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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)

August 6, 2010 Book Reviews
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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)On the surface Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays looks like yet another story of a beautiful, privileged woman suffering a nervous breakdown. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is going through the breakdown of her marriage to director Carter Lang. Yet, Didion’s writing avoids the typical hysteria. Her technique is sparse, the restraint she shows is purposely alienating, intent at keeping the reader at a distance from the true horror of Maria’s suffering. It protects us from the oblivion of nothingness that Maria feels, and forces us to confront it ourselves.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

To recount the plot seems futile, the narrative is built from key events seen through Maria’s eyes. Maria has been committed to some form of institution, and looks back over what happened in the lead up to, during, and after the breakdown of her marriage. There is no clear linear progression, but events, signs, symbols gradually do fall in to place. Maria has an abortion. Maria visits her ex-husband on a movie set in the desert. Maria watches her close friend commit suicide. Something as simple as a stilted telephone conversation, as momentous as an arrest in the desert, or the nightmarish hallucination of the contents of blocked drains are all told in a brutally dispassionate third-person voice.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

The structure of the novel is interesting too, opening with single chapters told in the first person from major characters – Maria’s manic, compelling voice, Helene reflecting on her conflicted relationship with Maria, and Carter trying to pinpoint where things started going wrong. From there, most of the novel is told in this distant third-person narration, until the end where Maria’s voice is heard again. This seems to mirror the state of Maria’s internal self, beginning with rampant self-obsession, turning to looking at herself from a disconnected and distant viewpoint and finally, we hope, gaining a stronger sense of her own identity by the end. It’s bleak, but Didion’s writing is so controlled that the emotional effect of these events, and of Maria’s perception of them, doesn’t hit until after. Play It As It Lays is a novel that lingers, becoming all the more powerful as time passes.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)

May 14, 2010 Book Reviews
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The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)After the experience of reading Nathanael West‘s previous three novels, I went into The Day of the Locust anticipating the awful things he would put his characters through; however, in The Day of the Locust West carefully and slowly reveals the sordid nature of his somewhat archetypal characters. It is an undeniably Los Angeles novel, with a cast of characters featuring set designers, producers, actresses, stage mothers and a gambling midget, but shatters the illusion of a glittering, glamourous Hollywood.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the monstrous.

Tod Hackett has been in Hollywood for three months to work in set and costume design for the movies. He dreams of becoming a “serious” painter, and even as he is drawn into the world of his commercial art, he still finds inspiration in the landscapes and people of California. It’s a place that is defined by an eclectic mix of styles – of clothing, of architecture – that seem to be always out of place, never quite right for the environment and it comes across as almost grotesque. Tod is presented, at first, as the typical everyman character – a little bland, but not unlikable – but his visions, behaviour and thoughts take a disturbing and unsettling turn as the woman he desires, struggling actress Faye Greener, becomes more involved with another man, Homer Simpson. His behaviour seems to be solely driven by his need to get as close as he can to Faye, including taking care of her ailing vaudevillian father Harry, and going along with her on her dates with other men.

Harry groaned again, modulating from pain to exhaustion, then closed his eyes. Tod saw how skilfully he got the maximum effect out of his agonized profile by using the pillow to set it off. He also noticed that Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree.

Homer Simpson is equally strange – Tod catches him outside their apartment building one evening staring up at Faye’s window and he has a mechanical, detached way of living. His relationship with Faye, especially after the death of her father, is categorized by the two of them as a convenient business arrangement. In other words, Homer has money and Faye thinks she needs money in order to become a star. Their relationship gradually deteriorates, they act out before the relationship is actually ended, Faye becomes more malicious, Homer tries to make things up by being more generous. Faye disappears after a fight between a number of men over her, and Homer and Tod are left to fight for themselves in a brutal crush at a movie premiere.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

It really is a strange little novel, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. Obviously it’s a comment on the illusions offered by entertainment, but also by our own desires and needs, and how badly we react when we realize these illusions are false. The transformation of the characters is extreme, seemingly motivated by the invisible dark force of disillusionment. They’ve all come to Hollywood to find something, someone, achieve a dream, only to find their search fruitless and their dreams destroyed. Faye turns from the coquettish ingenue to master manipulator of men. Tod changes from a dreamy artist to a man who vividly fantasizes about raping Faye. Homer, too, changes from a quiet, meek man to being capable of committing an unforgettable act of violence in the final riot. Deeply unsettling.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

March 31, 2010 Book Reviews
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Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)I read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time last year and I was not exactly what you would call an instant Hemingway convert. “JUST THROW THE EFFING FISH BACK!” yelled the heathen literal reader within. However, I am a creature of persistence and so I picked up Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta or, The Sun Also Rises. While I enjoyed it on the basic narrative level, I also wish it had delved deeper into the emotional complexities of these characters lives and world, rather than just making them seem like drunken animals. The prose is characteristically spare, devoid of all exposition or reflective passages – what happens simply happens.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Jake Barnes is living in Paris, impotent because of a vague war injury, and very much in love with the engaged Lady Brett Ashley. Jake discovers that Brett has also been having an affair with his friend Robert Cohn, and the tensions build on a trip to Pamplona where Jake, Brett, Robert, Brett’s fiancee Michael and Jake’s friend Bill travel to for the annual bullfighting fiesta. Cohn’s obsession with Brett grows, he cannot bear to be apart from her – frustrating not only Michael, but Jake and Brett as well. When Brett begins an affair with a young bullfighter Pedro Romero, jealousies between the men intensify and they resolve it in the way that men do: with some awkward, drunken fisticuffs. The novel ends in the aftermath of the fiesta, as Brett and Jake explore Madrid and she tells him that the two of them could have been good together. Jake’s great response to this is: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” In a line, summing up the exact pain and beauty of unrequited, impossible love.

It was a good morning, there were high white clouds above the mountains. It hadrained a little in the night and it was fresh and cool on the plateau, and there was a wonderful view. We all felt good and we felt healthy, and I felt quite friendly to Cohn. You could not be upset about anything on a day like that.
That was the last day before the fiesta.

The vagueness surrounding the war and how it has affected these characters is intriguing – what we assume to be a monumental event in their lives is given very little thought or reflection. Somehow, through Jake’s impotency through war injury, and the complete inability for these men to comprehend their situations through anything but violence and possession, Hemingway seems to be suggesting the war has altered the American understanding of masculinity, how men see themselves in relation to the world and to women. The bullfights and the seven day fiesta atmosphere act as a sometimes distracting backdrop to these concerns, but at the same time heightening the particular tensions between the friends. The intensity and bloodiness of the bullfight action disturbingly mirrors the intricacies of human affairs.

Hemingway manages to make the bloody sport – the bullfights, not the affairs – seem a graceful art, and it is here that the writing shows the most compassion and energy. While Hemingway’s sparse style doesn’t instantly appeal to me, after having read The Sun Also Rises and enjoying it on a narrative level, I am now more inclined to pick up another of his novels.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

February 1, 2010 Book Reviews
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A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is such a curious novel. At once acerbic social satire and vicious family melodrama, it examines the question of social propriety among the upper echelons of the moneyed classes and yet loses steam in the last third of the novel. For the most part, however, it beautifully illustrates the ultimate cruelties and snide savagery that humans are all too capable of.

‘That’s always the trouble with people when they start walking out. They either think no one knows, or everybody. The truth is that a few people like Polly and Sybil make a point of finding out about everyone’s private life; the rest of us just aren’t interested.’

Waugh begins the novel by introducing us to John Beaver, a hideous young man of little social standing – he’s always being called up at the last moment to fill in empty seats at dinner parties, he’s something of a joke within the moneyed social circle he moves in. Waugh moves on and introduces the Lasts, Lady Brenda and her husband Tony and their precocious child John Andrew, living in the Gothic surrounds of Tony’s familial estate Hetton. Their lifestyle seems to be largely idyllic, they don’t want for anything and Brenda and Tony’s relationship appears to be healthy and thriving, if a little fallen to routine. Into this idyll the unexpected arrival of Beaver has a profound effect on Lady Brenda, whose fascination with him leads her to London and eventually, embarking on a scandalous affair with the younger man. Scandalous not because of the age difference, or because she is already married – these sorts of frivolous affairs are quite common amongst the married set – but because of the disparity between their social positions. Brenda’s desire leads her to taking up a flat in London, apart from Tony, her son and Hetton.

It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. For them her circumstances shed peculiar glamour; for five years she had been a legendary, almost ghostly name, the imprisoned princess of a fairy story, and now that she had emerged there was more enchantment in the occurrence than in the mere change of habit of any other circumspect wife. Her very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy; Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her among the luminous clouds of deity.

Waugh’s writing is careful not to lay the blame on either side of the marriage. Showing the moroseness of both John Andrew and Tony left behind in Hetton, not aware of why Brenda is so taken with London all of a sudden, shifts our sympathies from her boredom and listlessness to their loss. After the tragic death of John Andrew, Brenda feels compelled (or freed) to tell Tony the truth about Beaver and London and that she wants a divorce. Because of her social status and to maintain social propriety – despite the fact that everyone already knew about the affair – Tony’s lawyers go to great lengths to create marital disruptions on his side to allow the divorce to move smoothly. A clandestine weekend with a woman from a club is more comic that it should be given the circumstances. Once the divorce proceedings are underway, suddenly Brenda and company are talking about Tony’s mortifying actions that lead to the necessary divorce, which is a confusing about face. I suppose maintaining the reputation of her good name is more important that anything even close to resembling the truth.

‘I hear Brenda disgraced herself,’ he said.
‘Goodness,’ said Brenda. ‘People do think that young men are easily come by.’

Whereas the social comedy is largely written in sparkling dialogue, but when Tony ventures to avoid all divorce proceedings and familial manipulations by taking an exotic trip overseas the tone significantly changes. Rather than relying on conversations to drive the narrative forward, it takes on a very different, more reflective and descriptive tone once Tony is abroad. Here the novel lost me a bit. Tony’s travels may have been interesting in their own right, but to become so involved in the inner workings of the social circles of the Lasts and then to be torn right out of it had a somewhat jarring effect. Perhaps this is to suggest Tony’s equal removal from society through no real fault of his own?

After such effective portrayal of the petty worries of the London elite, the ending is rather unsatisfying and bleak. Tony is lost in Brazil, captive to an old man who forces him to read Dickens to him every night; Brenda has remarried, not to Beaver, but to another of Tony’s close friends, and Hetton has passed into the hands of Tony’s relatives. Reflecting on it, I suppose that in A Handful of Dust Waugh was trying to show that all humans are capable of great savagery – whether it is discussed discreetly among friends in beautifully decorated drawing rooms or in the remote jungles and clay huts of the tropics.

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

December 8, 2009 Book Reviews
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All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)(A brief note: I do talk about some details which are essential to the plot, so be aware. This is your official spoiler warning.)

Before beginning to read All the King’s Men, I was under the impression – one of those pesky groundless preconceived notions that so often prove to be wildly incorrect – that it would be a very dry, heavily political novel. Had I done a little research beforehand, I would have discovered that Robert Penn Warren not only won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, but also for his poetry, making him the only person to win the Pulitzer for fiction and poetry. (He was also a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress.) Enough about the author, basically I approached  All the King’s Men with a misconception about the content and style, and was surprised, even pleased, to find that I was completely wrong.

Jack Burden, a wisecracking journalist, narrates the tale of and his role in the political career of Willie Stark, an idealistic and determined lawyer turned politician, in the early 1930s in the American South. Stark enters his political career primarily because of the corruption of others – an underhanded affair with a local schoolhouse goes fatally wrong which puts him in favour of the voters, he is the pawn in a political game to try and split the vote of another candidate running for Governor. It is this latter event, and the revelation of his role as a pawn, “a sap”, from his assistant/mistress Sadie Burke that sets in motion Stark’s attitude toward politics. Afterward, Stark is not afraid to use the same corrupt, morally questionable techniques in order to succeed. Eventually, he turns to use these on Jack Burden, his press man, who has close familial connections to influential people in the state. Interestingly, Warren presents these events non-chronologically, as Burden reflects back on their relationship together. It is a bit confusing at first, especially because the chapters are so long and it is easy to get lost in the temporal shifts. However, it is a clever stylistic technique, and comes to echo the theme of time, responsibility and retrospective reassessments of the past.

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake, don’t try to improve their minds.”

It is Willie Stark’s insistence that Burden scrounge around for any dirt on Judge Irwin, a prominent father figure of Jack’s youth and an ally to Stark’s political rival MacMurfee, that the story really springs from. Burden revisits his childhood and adolescence, the people and family members that populated those years and uncovers a hell of a lot more than he ever intended. While it is somewhat questionable, I thought, of Stark to encourage Burden to look into Judge Irwin’s past to find any misdeeds, Burden takes on the role with aplomb. A former student of history, Jack has a keen awareness of the importance of the past, but no real attachment to his own. Burden discovers an incident of bribery and suicide which implicates not only Judge Irwin, but Governor Stanton, the father of Burden’s close friends Anne and Adam Stanton. Unsurprisingly, Stark uses these connections and the knowledge of the event to use Adam and Anne for his own ends as well, making Adam Stanton the head of a new medical centre and taking Anne Stanton, the object of Jack’s affection, for his mistress. To Willie, everything and everyone is a potential political tool.

Feeling betrayed and rejected after finding out about Willie and Anne, Jack heads West, taking a road trip of self discovery, coming out of it with the theory that no one is responsible for anything, instead there is an uncontrollable, involuntary current which guides everything. This seems to be just another way for Burden to diminish his participation when things turn out badly. Burden confronts Judge Irwin about his involvement in the bribery/suicide case, leading to Irwin shooting himself later that night. Jack’s mother reveals that Judge Irwin was Jack’s biological father. Despite the violence that occurs as a result of his actions, Burden takes or seems to show little responsibility toward his part in it, assuaging any guilt by lying about their conversation.

I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

The novel ends in a display of bloodshed, Adam discovers the truth about Willie and Anne disrupting his staunchly held belief in the triumph of good and honesty over all else, and shoots Willie; Willie’s over protective driver Sugar Boy shoots Adam. As Jack tries to uncover who set in motion the carnage he comes to accept his responsibility, in part, for what happened. While he shows some awareness of how his actions influenced the actions of others, there still doesn’t seem to be any retribution or repentance for this. He ends with everything he ever wanted, money, the girl, the time to write his monograph on a distant family member and so on. At first, this ending didn’t really have much effect on me, but the night I finished it I woke up during the night and found myself thinking about it, incredibly incensed about how things transpired. Thinking further, it probably just reflects deeper on a comment Willie makes in the novel about how all good is built upon the foundation of corruption.

All the King’s Men is a powerful novel, definitely not the dry political tome I was expecting. Instead it examines the moral responsibility we should take for our actions and the implications and importance of time and hindsight in a detailed and vivid language.