John Green’s second novel An Abundance of Katherines again relies on the trope of feisty female as the emotional saviour of a socially awkward young male, yet manages to be an inviting, and very funny, look at teenage relationships and friendships. After being dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine, child prodigy Colin Singleton sets of on a cross-country road trip with his best friend Hassan in order to clear his mind and work on a mathematic formula which predicts the rate of relationship failure. Colin does come up with his desired formula, but more importantly, learns along the way, with a little help from a smart and sassy young woman named Lindsey, that the unpredictably best parts of life cannot be measured. Despite An Abundance of Katherines following a very similar track as Green’s previous novel, there is enough quirky characters and genuine humour and warmth to distinguish it in its own right.
“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring at the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.
Socially awkward and intellectually gifted, Colin Singleton is broken up over his most recent break-up with Katherine #19. (I’ve tried not to over think how such a socially inept young man has managed to charm nineteen Katherines, when he is completely and utterly devoid of social skills.) His best friend, the hilarious Hassan, takes him on a cross-country road trip to heal his wounds, landing finally in Gutshot, Tennessee via a visit to the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and decide to stop in Gutshot working for her mother. Bonding with Lindsey and her friends, and working on his formula to predict the outcomes of his Katherine relationships, Colin learns a little about himself, and a lot about life.
The reading quieted his brain a little. Without Katherine and without the Theorem and without his hopes of mattering, he had very little. But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
My main issue with Looking for Alaska [review] was the use of Alaska as a narrative device rather than a fully fleshed out character; her motivations are hidden, but only to be uncovered by our sleuthing protagonist. In An Abundance of Katherines, the female romantic lead, Lindsey, forms a more genuine connection with Colin without the manic mood swings or mysterious air, before exploring their relationship further. Though Colin does come to see the unpredictability of life as a grand pleasure through Lindsey’s influence, it seems to shift based on more a shared experience – they both overcome heartache and find each other, and happiness, despite of it.
An Abundance of Katherines is full of random trivial tidbits and a number of seemingly insignificant subplots, all of which somehow manage to strengthen a reader’s perception of the story and the characters. The friendship between Hassan and Colin is very funny, a pair of more unlikely friends you could not imagine, but their sincere affection and friendly vernacular are so endearing. Even if his use of female characters is a little problematic, John Green knows how to write about close friendships and An Abundance of Katherines is a clever and amusing look at the complexity of friendships, relationships and our own understanding of life.
In John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter, a fan of the last words of famous individuals, decides to act on the advice of Rabelais’ supposed last words to seek the “Great Perhaps” by transferring from his high school in Florida to the boarding school Culver Creek in Alabama. Moving from a mostly friendless school life to the constant companionship of Culver Creek, Miles learns to combine social and educational responsibilities. His immersion into a group of merry pranksters, including his roommate the Colonel, introduces him to the desirable and yet distant Alaska Young. Alaska is the teen literature equivalent of film’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, eccentric in her behaviour and tastes, with carefully affected quirks, which exist solely in order to teach the young, male protagonist about Life. Or, as is the case in Looking for Alaska, death.
Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
The novel is divided into two distinct parts, Before and After, although until the After we can only guess what the before and after refers to. I have a soft spot for boarding school stories, stemming I think from a youthful foray into Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series, which is why the Before section of the novel was so appealing. I really loved the Before section, as the group bonded and went through requisite teenage rituals of drinking and smoking and pulling elaborate pranks, learning to deal with unrequited desires and sex. The companionable intimacy was warm, rich unlikely dialogue and a romanticized view of the banal daily realities of their lives (similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s “we were infinite” moments.) Although Alaska did show signs of being another fantasy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Miles, the one who would show him about life, love and making it through the labyrinth of suffering, it never reached that stage, as the event the Before has been leading up to is Alaska’s death. On the verge of consummating his desire for her, distraught and drunk Alaska asks for the Colonel and Miles to cover for her and she drives off into the night toward her death.
I hadn’t thought of her smell since she died. But when the Colonel opened the door, I caught the edge of her scent: wet dirt and grass and cigarette smoke, and beneath that the vestiges of vanilla-scented skin lotion. She flooded into my present and only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her dresser. It looked as I remembered it: hundreds of books stacked against the walls, her lavender comforter crumpled at the foot of her bed, a precarious stack of books on her bedside table, her volcanic candle just peeking out from beneath the bed. It looked as I knew it would, but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me. I stood in the centre of the room, my eyes shut, inhaling slowly through my nose, the vanilla and the uncut autumn grass, but with each slow breath, the smell faded as I became accustomed to it and soon she was gone again.
Wracked with guilt, and what feels like only the slightest suggestion of grief, After shows Miles and the Colonel not only dealing with the possibility of their role in her death but attempting to resolve the circumstances of her death. Was it an accidental collision, or illustrative of suicidal behaviour? Miles and the Colonel focus their attentions – perhaps as a way of showing their grief – to playing detective. As the pieces come together, their conclusion amounts to little more than a heartfelt response to a homework essay for a religion class. They don’t come to terms with death itself, only with Alaska’s death. Her role and her death is minimized to freeing them of their own guilt – the upstanding young men learn their lesson, but the manic, troubled young girl must die for them to do so.
All problematic issues aside, Green’s writing style is lively, littered as it is with interesting references and lively dialogue. I’ve a feeling I would have loved it as a teenager, as it focuses on bookish, slightly socially outcast students who manage to navigate the weird terrain of high school with style, smarts, charm and just the right amount of awkwardness. Nonetheless, the reduction of Alaska to a totem of male fantasy and deliverance from guilt is disappointing, but I intend to read more of John Green’s young adult fiction in the future.
The Temple-Goers, journalist Aatish Taseer’s debut novel, is a novel about friendships that cross socio-economic barriers, the distinction between the rich and the poor, ambition and pride, lust, love, religious faith,bitter hatred and the struggle for cohesive national identity in contemporary, postcolonial Delhi. The divide of traditional beliefs and practices collide with the contemporary and modern beliefs and practices brought to India by student émigrés shape the difficulties of developing a cohesive cultural and national identity. In The Temple-Goers, these issues are explored through the relationships of a privileged writer named Aatish Taseer who befriends an ambitious, significantly poorer young man, Aakash. Aakash’s assimilation into Aatish’s world sets in motion a number of irreparable changes in both of their lives.
Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.
After a stint in London, Aatish returns to Delhi to revise his novel, he spends his time with his devoted girlfriend, Sanyogita, and attend numerous parties and events. Recommended a gym by a family friend, he meets the enigmatic trainer Aakash. The two build a friendship which seems to be based on mutual admiration or envy of the other. Aakash, though living in a poor area of Delhi and with no entry into the privileged world that Aatish lives in, manages to integrate with Aatish’s social circle and significantly improve his social standing. Throughout the novel the writing is lushly floral and colourful, as Aatish casts a watchful and aware eye over his surroundings, both those familiar and unknown.
The light in Delhi had changed; it came now from another angle, and far from striking the surface of buildings, seemed to lose its footing on rooftops and columns. And though it was warm, you could sit in it for hours without breaking into a sweat. Hazy and scented with smoke, it rose like a glow from the city, heightening the sensory power of the Delhi winter. The bougainvillea, the occasional smell of kebabs, the wail of a garbage collector created so acute an impression that it was as if some part of an old photograph, having shed the inertia of years, had gently begun to move.
Using himself, or a fictionalized version of himself, characterized as a writer allows Taseer to subtly provide an interesting form of self-criticism, in a way preempting any criticism from the reader. It’s a clever technique, but not used to excess. Aatish receives the long awaited readers notes from the revised version of his novel; Aatish and Sanyogita discuss the merits of the work of Aatish’s writer friend and mentor; Zafar, Aatish’s Urdu teacher and renowned poet, and the writer friend provide him with writing advice – all of these incidences add a touch of self-awareness to the text. Not enough to distance the reader from the powerful narrative, but enough to give reason and evidence as to why The Temple-Goers is written as it is.
His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ’something fresh and original.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’
‘And write in English?’
‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’
The blurb and prologue of The Temple-Goers hint at a highly televised murder which doesn’t really come to the forefront of the narrative until the last fifty pages. While I did enjoy the rest of the novel, the gradual build up of Aatish and Aakash’s relationship and the gradual decay of Aatish and Sanyogita’s relationship, the vivid imagery of an India still trying to find it’s identity and the profound schism between the country’s rich and poor – the set-up in the promotional material or the introductory chapter of the supposedly crucial murder (and, presumably, who committed the crime, and all the how and why questions that come along with it) creates an expectation which is never quite fulfilled. When the murder and its wide reaching repercussions do reach their climax, it feels all too rushed, given the languid time spent on all the other details of the narrative. This horrific event, the brutal murder of a character we have come to know not intimately, but enough to feel the shock, however predictable it is, and the ways in which the convictions play out are accelerated so much that their effects aren’t as deeply felt as other aspects of the novel. Perhaps this expedited account is to suggest the stark difference between the daily realities of Delhi and how quickly events can change our circumstances, our relationships and our friendships. Regardless, I wish it had been drawn out more, reading another two hundred pages of Taseer’s vibrant writing would have been a pleasure.
A compelling narrative about friendships and rapacious ambition, and a portrait of a modern, changing India, The Temple-Goers really surprised me. From the promotional material and vague recollections of interviews and brief mentions in articles, along with the publicist-ready catchphrase of “the Indian Bret Easton Ellis”, I expected something a lot more dry, amoral and disconnected. Instead, The Temple-Goers offers a rich insight into another culture undergoing an immense shift, while personalizing this through understandably flawed and conflicted characters.
[Disclaimer: publisher supplied advance reading copy. An extract of The Temple-Goers is available online.]
Christos Tsiolkas‘ Loaded follows Ari, a nineteen year old of Greek heritage and a sexuality he is not entirely comfortable with, in the hedonistic events of one night out in Melbourne. Although he has no problem with his desire to sleep with masculine men, he feels some discomfort in labeling himself as gay; it’s not just his sexuality that he dislikes defining, but his entire self, his racial and cultural heritage, his taste in music, he refuses the delineations of identity that society, his family and his peers want him to define himself by. He eschews work and study, and becomes frustrated and impatient when people seem to demand that he “do something.” Caught between the traditional Greek culture of his immigrant parents and his position in the contemporary Australian society, and not feeling at ease in either, Ari struggles toward finding a place where he can just be himself without outside constraints or imposed definitions.
Speed is exhilaration. Speed is colours reflecting light with greater intensity. Speed, if it’s good, can take me higher than I can ever go, higher than my natural bodily chemicals can take me. [...] On speed I feel macho, but not aggressive. I’m friendly to everyone. Speed evaporates fear. On speed I dance with my body and my soul. In this white powder they’ve distilled the essence of the Greek word kefi. Kefi is the urge to dance, to be with good friends, to open your arms to life. Straight, I can approximate kefi, but I am always conscious of fighting off boredom. Speed doesn’t let you get bored.
Ari’s voice is undeniably passionate, confused as it is. He is full of adolescent generalizations about people who aren’t like himself, and he is not afraid to voice them. Though his experience of life is troubled by numerous conflicts, he cannot seem to see the same ruptures at work in the lives of others, choosing instead to take a simplified view of any one else. Even Johnny, Ari’s openly gay friend, whose confrontations with his father have been complex doesn’t receive much sympathy from Ari. When Johnny appears as Toula, his drag alter ego, Ari refuses to acknowledge or address him as Toula, instead insisting on calling him Johnny. While there is a friendliness between them, and a closeness, but these little things make up the sum of Ari’s personality. Even Ari’s sexual partners do not receive much thought, even objects of intense desire, especially after the physical act of sex has taken place. Then, for Ari, all mystery has gone. He has known them physically, so as Ari surmises, he has known them fully. This is all he has wanted them for, true, but the dismissal is abrupt and complete.
Inherently Melbournian, Loaded is divided into four sections – East, North, South and West – each representing time spent in the suburbs in the corresponding parts of Melbourne. As Ari articulates his frustration and rage, he manages to also pin down the divisions between different parts of the city – from the standards of living, the types of people who congregate there, what that represents and how it relates to his own experiences of life. Here is where the novel had so much power for me, though Ari’s outlook is much more cynical and pessimistic than mine, like the divides that ravage his search for identity, he sees the divides that separate the city:
The West at night, as you drive over the Westgate Bridge, is a shimmering valley of lights. In the day, under the harsh glare of the sun, the valley reveals itself as an industrial quilt of wharfs, factories, warehouses, silos and power plants. And the endless stretch of suburban housing estates. The West is a dumping ground; a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the poor, the insane, the unskilled and the uneducated. There is a point in my city, underneath the Swanston Street Bridge where you can sit by the Yarra River and contemplate the chasm that separates this town. Look down the river towards the East and there are green parks rolling down to the river, beautiful Victorian bridges sparkle against the blue sky. Face West and there is the smoke scarred embankment leading towards the wharfs. The beauty and the beast. All cities, all cities depend on this chasm.
Rife with a drug fueled frenetic energy that doesn’t let up, Loaded kept me up to the early hours of the morning. The complex issues of immigrant identity, second generation immigrant children, sexuality, racial tension, desire and family are all explored in a youthful, vivacious, unrelenting prose that hums with the energy of late nights, pills and booze.
Characterized in the blurb as the antithesis of the hedonistic exploits of the young rich of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis‘ fiction, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up explores life at the other end of the scale, the destitute, the equally lost and the seemingly hopeless with the same amoral tone. A brief word about the cover design, you can probably imagine how the back cover looks from the front, and so when the reader is reading it the title forms a sort of caption which invites comparison. I can’t decide if it is appealingly minimalist design or self-consciously humiliating.
In The Fuck-Up, the unnamed narrator navigates the underworld of 1980s New York, getting by on lies and just enough luck. Having been dumped by both his girlfriend and his near-mistress, and being fired from his job at a movie theatre for asking for and receiving a raise which caused an upset among the other employees, the narrator moves in with a slightly older intellectual friend, Helmsley, and finds another low paying job in a gay porn theatre. Overhearing a conversation on a train, he goes for the job opportunity and lies to his neo-hippie businessman boss Miguel about his sexuality in order to secure his position. As he wanders the streets and contemplates his life, he accidentally finds himself the victim of a number of brutally violent incidents which propel him into further complicated arrangements, including an affair with an unstable older woman, taking up a sublet of a famous film director’s apartment, and shady business arrangements with Miguel, each destroying his life in their own way.
By the end of the second week, I stopped getting up before noon, and by the middle of the third week I stopped shaving altogether. I’d lie around in bed watching daytime TV, which is the first sign of nervous breakdown in an enlightened culture. First, I watched the noon news and talk shows, then the game shows, onto the late-afternoon talk shows, and finally I was glued to the soaps. After that TV-mangled period, I stopped watching and just slept a lot.
The narrator is far from stupid or clueless, but he manages to continually implicate himself in awful situations until, releasing himself from hospital after a vicious beating, Helmsley’s suicide, jobless after the scam is revealed, and homeless after the film director discovers he has been sleeping with his girlfriend, he finds himself made anonymous by complete destitution. Unlike most novels that let their characters sink to this level of physical desperation, of constant hunger and no glimmer of hope, there is never the sense that everything will be made okay by the last pages, which allows the physical and psychological abasement to be strongly felt. While things do eventually begin to look up for our nameless hero, it comes without any moralizing and from the most unlikely source, broadening our understanding of two of the characters.
Drifting up Broadway, past the youth industry, complete with all the latest fashion outposts, I was a ghost. I tried to look into eyes, but if anyone cast a fearful glance at me it was only so that they’d be sure they were avoiding me. I was no longer a member of the human club. But I had to get back in. I kept reassuring myself that if I thought hard enough I could find a solution. But I was working under a ruptured brain. Thoughts braced against the incomprehensible, straining to pick up a weight just an ounce too heavy for my thought muscles.
Engaging and darkly funny, like Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction of hyper self-aware characters without the explicit grotesqueries, The Fuck-Up isn’t afraid to delve into the lives and aspects of society we too often shy away from. The Fuck-Up takes hipster slackerdom and pushes it to its most extreme, and it is not pretty.
Seeing Helen Garner talk last week at the Wheeler Centre (some video footage from the event is now available online) has given me reason to return to her work, even though I was not wholly convinced by Monkey Grip. (Although, I think because at the time I was still recovering from removing myself from a similarly vicious and cyclic relationship, that may have been the cause of my vehement reaction to Nora’s actions. I do intend to return to it when my feelings about that situation aren’t so volatile. I suppose my point being that personal circumstances always effect how you read a book, but it isn’t the only way.) I had started The Spare Room in the lead up to seeing Garner’s discussion, but hearing her talk so eloquently about her craft has inspired me to further explore her writing.
I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon.
In The Spare Room, Garner has fictionalized her own experiences; Nicola, a friend dying of cancer seeks refuge at Helen’s house in Melbourne while undergoing experimental alternative treatment. The conflict arises not from Nicola’s visitation, but rather her refusal to accept her fate and her endless hope in what Helen sees as disreputable. As the battery of the treatments take effect and require more and more of Helen’s physical assistance, the emotional impact begins to take its toll. Confrontations with the practitioner amount to vague threats and uncontrollably (and understandably) emotional outbursts of anger, the support of Nicola’s family members offers some respite but is all too brief.
We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.
The emotional impact on the reader doesn’t come solely from the question of the morality of shady alternatives that falsely encourage hope in terminally ill patients, but rather the strength of the relationship between Nicola and Helen, even at its darkest and when all hope appears to be lost. As an unashamedly selfish twenty-something, it made me ask myself the question of how far would I be willing to go for someone I care about? What responsibilities to our loved ones do we hold in our relationship with them? To what extent are we willing to accept responsibility of their well being? In The Spare Room, Helen is happy to take on the draining routines of care even though she wasn’t asked, but she also recognizes her own inability to fully deal with the situation.
Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches our virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.
The Spare Room is moving, but not in an abrasive or showy manner. By outlining the daily routines associated with caring for the terminally ill loved one in clear-eyed and honest prose it presents it as a quiet reality. Littering it with references to iconic Melbourne landmarks, events and streets adds to this sense of everyday reality, but again, it’s not the sense of location that is the focus of the novel – it is in the relationships and the question of responsibility within them.
Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers‘ final novel, is permeated by a sense of illness, death and social disease. Set in a small town in the South of the United States, circling the lives of four very different men, two young, two old, their lives collide in the present and in the past in a series of violent, unsettling confrontations. Bleak and despondent as it is, McCullers imbues this darkness with an understanding of the fragility of the human heart, the futile rage against death and the necessity of the fight against social injustice.
The novel opens with J.T. Malone, the local pharmacist, discovering that he is suffering from leukemia and only has a few months to live. A mostly virtuous man, he begins to question and lash out at the world which offers him no hope, no cure and no redemption. He considers his life differently knowing that he has not much time left to live it. He maintains a somewhat close friendship with the larger than life figure of Judge Fox Clane. Excessive in opinion, body and stature, but with his mind succumbing to the senility of old age and having suffered a stroke which paralyzed half his body and dealing with diabetes, the Judge continually denies any evidence of illness to all outsiders. His wife’s death left a considerable gap in his life, and he tries to fill it with other women, women with similar habits or looks, only to find them all unsatisfactory. Having lost his only son to suicide, the Judge’s only relation is the idealistic and sensitive Jester Clane.
Several months ago he had read in these bylines the words: ‘How can the dead truly be dead when they are still walking in my heart?’ It was from an old Indian legend and the Judge could not forget it.
Jester’s relationship with his grandfather is bristling with their conflicting opinions over the issue of race. While the Judge longs for the old days of the South, Jester antagonizes him with his desire for full integration. Despite the Judge’s racist attitudes, his closest relationship is with his amanuensis, the blue-eyed black boy Sherman Pew. An orphan who is constantly searching for his unknown mother, and desperately seeking her in musical stars, Sherman is prickly to everyone that is around him. Nonetheless, he and Jester share a friendly competitiveness and antagonism which often becomes humiliating to both. Jester, it is suggested, harbours deeper feelings for Sherman.
Not only are their current lives and situations delicately intertwined, but as the novel moves along and revelations are made, their pasts are just as connected. Jester’s discovery of his father’s personality and circumstances before his suicide through the late night hysterics of the Judge answers the vital questions of identity for him, whereas Sherman’s own acknowledgment of his parentage only leads to more questions and his sense of self utterly destroyed. It is these questions and uncertainty that lead him to take action against the racist implications of the town, which in turn leads to the horrifically violent confrontation that ends in his death. Meanwhile, Malone, gradually closer to his death, stands up to his townsfolk and refuses their intense appetite for destruction in the name of morality, making his final grasp at heroism. Though he doesn’t achieve it in the eyes of the betrayed, hurt townspeople, he comes closer to peace with himself and the world around him.
As he sat holding the pestle there was in him enough composure to wonder at those alien emotions that had veered so violently in his once mild heart. He was split between love and hatred – but what he loved and what he hated was unclear. For the first time he knew that death was near him. But the terror that choked him was not caused by the knowledge of his own death. The terror concerned some mysterious drama that was going on – although what the drama was about Malone did not know. The terror questioned what would happen in those months – how long? – that glared upon his numbered days. He was a man watching a clock without hands.
The most somber detail of the novel is the profound sense of the failure of traditional spiritual or religious modes to explain death or to offer comfort to the dying. The Judge freely moves from church to church, mainly hoping to find someone who can mimic his dead wife than to find solace in religion; Malone too looks for comfort in the church but fails to find it, and yet refuses to commit the act of violence because he doesn’t want to endanger his soul. Redemption is made on earth, in humane actions, but Malone seeks justification for it in the sacred.
Yes, the earth had revolved its seasons and spring had come again. but there was no longer a revulsion against nature, against things. A strange lightness had come upon his soul and he exalted. He looked at nature now and it was part of himself. He was no longer a man watching a clock without hands. He was not alone, he did not rebel, he did not suffer. He did not even think of death these days. He was not a man dying – nobody died, everybody died.
As in all of McCullers’ novels, Clock Without Hands seeks to explore the injustices of society, spiritual isolation and confusion, the confounding nature of human love and affection, our own battles with ourselves prying us apart from those around us. Yet, as bleak as the issues it deals with are, one doesn’t leave the vivid world of Clock Without Hands feeling weighed down by the impotence of our struggle against death, but rather with the intimation that hope is always available at all junctures of life, even on the very cusp of death.
From the suggestive pose of the silhouette on the cover, and a brief flick through in which phrases like “desperate sluts” and “big tits” jumped out at me, I didn’t exactly expect much from Clinton Caward’s debut novel Love Machine. Even the blurb made me think “oh, great, a story about a down and out guy who wants to save a prostitute.” Love Machine’s book trailer on youtube, gives much more of an accurate representation than the cover or the blurb. And yet, I still picked up the proof from work and promptly settled in with it. The strengths of Love Machine allowed me to see past my first impressions, and to find in Clinton Caward a gritty realist writing style which I look forward to reading more of in the future.
The Kings Cross circus was free and open for business every day of the year. It drew people from everywhere into this tiny postcode, stripped them back to their most basic needs, and played it out on the streets. The sex and the drink and the drugs were there for all to see, but you didn’t have to watch for long until the violence began to show itself too.
In Love Machine, Spencer is an underpaid, somewhat aimless, retail monkey in an underground sex shop in Kings Cross. The cavalcade of clientele and co-workers are colourful with innumerable quirks, kinks and fetishes, all of which Spencer has the means to fulfill. In his time away from work, he is filming a biblical epic with blow-up dolls. A chance meeting with a young prostitute, Livia, sets in motion a series of life changes causing Spencer to start question what he really wants.
Just saying Livia’s name lit something up inside me. I saw her moving under the moon and I wanted to put my arms around her and protect her from all the horrors of life, although she’d seen many more of them than I had. Like characters in a novel, we’d be happy, fixing our problems, moving toward self-revelation, culminating with her straddling me on a beach in a windstorm. But life lacked that kind of structure. It was formless and full of dark emotional things that changed shape like the weather.
While being a mildly amusing piece of ladlit, Love Machine’s strengths lie in the portrayal of the seedier side of inner-city living; of small-time criminals, of drug dealing, of prostitution and a general unsettling and grimy vibe. It also grasps at the frustration of working a low wage job, and the brief camaraderie that comes with such careers. As Spencer spends time with his brother in the house they grew up in, the banality, dysfunction and casual violence of poorer suburbs is also adequately captured, and lends it a distinct, albeit dirty and often brutal, dignity. I think this sense comes from not trying to romanticize working class suburbia, but rather accepting it fully, faults and all. It is suburbia that offers Livia and Spencer their escape from the constant barrage of sleaze in their lives.
I took the cover from his hand to look at the pictures. I wondered what would happen after all the taboos were broken. What would excite us? Boredom was the real truth about too much pornography. What would happen when we were completely bored with everything that was streamed live through the internet twenty-four hours a day? Once we were desensitised, would the economies of the world, no longer lubricated by sexual advertising, grind to a halt?
Although there were a lot of aspects of this novel that didn’t appeal to me – particularly the idea of Spencer as the male saviour of Livia, saving her from working in the sex trade, drugs and a violent ex-boyfriend; the religious undertones which never fully took shape – but it wasn’t completely without merit. Although I imagined I was not exactly the target demographic of such a novel and a lot of it is rehashing out the same male fantasy, I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed it.
When I read Francesca Lia Block, I tend to go on a binge of her writing, catching up on everything that has been released/acquired by local libraries since the last Block binge. A chance wander into the young adult section at the library and I happened upon the slight Blood Roses, very likely setting myself up for another rampage of her dreamy prose. Blood Roses is composed of brief glimpses at the lives of a group of very loosely connected evolving young women. Block’s signature chimerical prose takes us through these moments of transformation imagined as supremely powerful and magical.
Essentially modern day parables of adolescence, Block introduces mythological elements – centaurs, fairies, angels, aliens, and such - into everyday adolescent lives in order to articulate their various struggles. A boyfriend imagined as an alien with supernatural powers over his paramour. An abused daughter who sees Death taking home in her dollhouse. A grieving young man meeting a young fairy to escape from his pain. A girl who finds herself transforming into a giant after her first kiss.
What shall we do, all of us? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?
I’m not usually into such fantastical elements in my fiction, but the way Block writes about them makes it possible to read them as allegorical, imagined in order to cope with the stresses of life. Her prose is so luxurious and sumptuous, so based in the natural amid a chaotic mechanical modern world. It’s not a style that is for everyone (and I myself wouldn’t be able to only read this sort of writing), but it is brilliantly evocative, even when talking about admiring the scars of the clipped wings of (well, possibly) an angel. I think that is where the power of Block’s writing lies, in an ultimate belief in the possible and the power of perception.
You Know You Love Me is the second installment in Cecily von Ziegesar’s wildly successful Gossip Girl series, and although I still feel mildly embarrassed about reading these books, it is a small improvement on the first novel. The characters, their personalities and ranking in their social system now familiar, continue to play out their superficial dramas in the Upper East Side. Alongside the ubiquitous references to sex, alcohol, brands and bitchiness, the tribulations of college interviews, young romantic love and the pressures of the final school year add a level of verisimilitude that was missing from the first novel. And manages to add just a touch of reality for those of us that led a decidedly less chaotic adolescence.
Welcome to New York City’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I all live in huge, fabulous apartments and go to exclusive private schools. We aren’t always the nicest people in the world, but we make up for it in looks and taste.
Blair Waldorf is still an excruciatingly spoiled brat. Her mother Eleanor is gearing up for her wedding to the so not up to Blair’s standards, Cyrus Rose, and to further disappoint Blair, has announced the wedding will take place the same day as Blair’s all-important eighteenth birthday. Add to that, her attempts to lose her virginity – although her constant mentions of “doing it” in place of any actual reference to the sexual act itself grates on the nerves, and adds immaturity to her character. I wonder if this is to appease the teen audiences or (cough) intentional characterization – with her altogether unwilling boyfriend, the perpetually stoned Nate. Blair sees consumption and material gifts as the ultimate signs of her love. She steals a pair of cashmere pajama pants, her credit card is declined while her mother joins her bank accounts with her fiancé, for Nate in order to show just how much he means to her. Nate, despite existing in a permanently drugged haze, recognizes this for what it is: a blatant demand for his attention toward her. Nate, meanwhile, is avoiding Blair and nurturing a rather sweet blossoming relationship with Jennifer Humphrey.
This was definitely not in the script.
And as she looked on in horror and fascination, Blair had the most starkly disappointing realization of her entire life. Worse even than the thought of not getting into Yale.
Nate wasn’t her leading man. He wasn’t going to sweep her off her feet and love her and only er. He was just a supporting actor, some loser who would drop off the screen before the final act. And if that was the case, she definitely didn’t want him.
Serena van der Woodsen is spending more time with Dan Humphrey, who pines and moans even when he has the girl of his dreams. Thankfully, Serena becomes suitably creeped out by Dan’s Young Werther shtick (although, apparently that kind of thing works for some: Goethe as a seduction strategy!) and distances herself from him; he then realizes that Vanessa is the one he’s really supposed to be with – ah, that old “oh I’m really in love with my best friend, the artsy alternative girl with the shaved head and not the model-esque, impossibly perfect dream girl” trope coming into play – Vanessa is clearly the most interesting character out of the lot of them, I wish she had more of a central role.
In between all the romantic entanglements, the kids go on separate and converging road trips to their desired college destinations; mostly spectacularly flubbing the interviews. Blair bonds with her new stepbrother, the potentially interesting Aaron Rose, and despite breaking down in her important application interview, a sweetly worded email to Daddy and a swift generous donation are sure to undo any necessity for hard work and effort. It’s this sort of reliance on money and its powers that contradict Blair’s drive to achieve perfection. Is it solely ambition? Or the desire to work for what she receives rather than have everything handed to her on a silver platter? An inferiority complex? Just completely unable to comprehend personal failure on any level? Apparently this conundrum is what makes Blair Waldorf such a multi-faceted character, although I’m not convinced.
While it is very easy to get caught up on the lackluster writing (why does Blair’s middle name change from Faith to Cornelia toward the end of the book? Why the reliance on a gossip blog which only discusses the same six characters over and over, is the world of the Upper East Side teenagers so inane that they are only really interested in a handful of their peers?) and the trash value of the series, You Know You Love Me allows for a few hours of escapism into the petty, often spiteful world of the over-privileged children of the wealthy.
