evelyn_b

The Mosquito Coast (by Paul Theroux) and Darconville's Cat (by Alexander Theroux) are next to each other in the 99 Novels book and next to each other on their shelf at the library. They are not alike at all, except that they are both about ill-adjusted men whose intelligence is no consolation. Darconville's Cat is a big, noisy, goofy, Renaissance-inflected 3D labyrinth about a sweaty, loathing-lit young litterateur with trad-Catholic inclinations, who is also lithe and attractive to women, like Ignatius J. Reilly's most secret self-insert. While working on his own large grimoire of a novel, he realizes he needs money for food and whatnot, so he takes a job teaching English at an academically negligible women's college in Virginia. The descriptions of the American South and its culture are wonderfully, indulgently mean and musical. They are like someone read Nabokov On America and thought, "The problem with this guy is twofold: not enough adjectives and not enough contempt." This kind of thing is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it probably reflects well on you if it's not yours, but I enjoy a little mean music from time to time.

Darconville falls in love with a student, Isabel; she reciprocates, but the idyll is spotty, like most idylls, and doesn't last. When Darconville gets a surprise appointment to Harvard, she gets cold feet and doesn't join him as planned.

At Harvard, he meets an insane misogynist eunuch who lives in an attic, Dr. Crucifer, who may be a figment of his imagination/his doubts about Isabel made manifest. There's actually nothing to strongly support this interpretation as far as I can tell, but I thought it anyway just because he's so weird and shrill, and because that's the role he plays. Dr. Crucifer yells at Darconville about the sterility of love and the perfidity of women for about a million pages, with plenty of pungent inventiveness (and many a reference to Elizabeth I of England, the patron monster of the book, her bald head and spurious virginity). Isabel breaks up with him in an inconsiderate and embarrassing way; Crucifer tries to get him to kill her (one of the chapters is just a long, LONG list of gruesome murder methods, shrieked by Crucifer at the top of his lungs); he goes to Venice instead and dies of sadness and/or pneumonia. The summary doesn't do it justice, because it's not really a novel about a guy who has an ill-fated affair with his student, but a very long, deliberately fantastic, many-fingered jam session on the theme of The Girl I'll Never Understand. This is a deeply eccentric book by a guy who clearly doesn't mind you thinking he loves language better than people.

The Mosquito Coast is spare and lean and more or less contemporary, rather than early-modern, alchemical, and gouty. Allie Fox is an inventor who has always been on the outside of things, but it's not because he's a failure, it's SOCIETY that's the failure. He picks fights with hardware store employees about carrying imported goods - where's their Made In America tubes and hoses? He picks fights with every single retailer about their ridiculous prices, and prefers to shop at the local dump. He's convinced that America is going to be destroyed any minute and he, the last true man in America and possibly the last on earth - is going to have to start the whole world over again, his way this time. One day he buys a load of mosquito netting and some baseball caps (since the better hats are too expensive), and moves the family to Honduras, to a shabby port city and then upriver, where he bullies a few families into joining his icemaking scheme in the middle of nowhere. He declares to his family that anyway, America is destroyed now, there was a huge war just as they left, so now the wasteland is literal and there's no back to go. (Spoiler: America has not been destroyed in this book). For a little while, things are almost ok, in spite of the craziness of the plan. Then they aren't anymore.

Allie is a brilliantly compelling family-size monster who burns up all the oxygen in the book, so that the other characters in his orbit - Charlie, the wary and confused young narrator, his siblings, and their mother - barely have the chance to exist, and barely manage to do or feel anything except in reaction to him. This is both effective and a little frustrating. I found myself wishing that the mother in particular could have been more of a character - I wanted to know something about how she came to hitch her wagon to this dangerous and eternally disappointing star. But even if she'd wanted to talk about it to her kids, there was no opportunity. Mad Dad is always watching. There's a scene where they're on one of their duct-taped river boats, miles from anywhere they've ever been, and he dives under to fetch a boat part out of the mud. He's gone for so long that the family starts to panic, and so long after that that they start to talk about what to do next if he's dead. They'll have to find a town - they'll have to go home. Relief sneaks over each of them. Then he bursts out of the water, shouting, "Traitors!"

There are now only two books left of the 99 Novels - The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies, which looks to be some kind of breezy campus thing, and my main man Norman Mailer's Egyptian shitstravaganza, Ancient Evenings.

How can you still be reading Gravity's Rainbow? Haven't you finished it yet?

No. I am on page 620 of 887 as of this posting.

Other people like Gravity's Rainbow just fine, don't they?

Other people love Gravity's Rainbow. thedoubtfulguest shared this piece by Gerald Howard alongside several other writers, all of whom have had the thrilling experience of liking Gravity's Rainbow, who are able to describe it with love and understanding, and who compare it, with justice, to some books that I loved. There is interesting publishing history here as well as criticism. These Pynchon fans are smart people who are good at reading books and writing about them. I encourage you to go and read them now instead of listening to me whine.

I call them the Rainbros. It's not meant to be dismissive. I envy them their happiness.

So what's wrong with you, then? Why do you just keep staring helplessly at this masterpiece of 20th Century lit like someone left a dead rat with a ribbon on it under your Christmas tree?

I don't know! Because he was he, because I was I, man. It's just one of those things.

Are you just a prude who only ever wants books to be nice?

Deep down, probably, though I try to rein in that tendency when I can. Here I've been less successful than usual. I definitely resented having to read the chapter in which Slothrop has sex with a twelve-year-old three times over, first to figure out if it was maybe actually a dream (no luck), and then to get the full import of the admittedly beautiful closing paragraphs. I also resented that after approx. 3727 pages, I still didn't care about Slothrop enough to be angry or disappointed or dismayed by this choice of his. The frictionless chrome forgettability of every single character in this cast of thousands is probably part of the point (one reviewer suggests that I have misunderstood the book by "thinking about characters when [I] should be laughing at grotesques"); the selfish misuse of children by adults definitely is. I also slightly resent my total inability to care about these points as presented by Gravity's Rainbow.

So are the Rainbros all liars? Is this book actually garbage?

No, they're telling the truth. It's ambitious, polymathic, fearlessly strange and meticuously constructed. There are gems in this dream-sewer. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

Can you provide an example of the writing style?

Of course! Please be aware that the "writing style" of Gravity's Rainbow is always shifting and this example may not be representative. It does, however, have plenty of songs.

( Final assembly went on in Stollen 41 )

Isn't it time to admit you're just bad at reading?

Yes, but being bad at reading hasn't prevented me from enjoying many other books. I even enjoyed parts of Giles Goat-Boy, an almost totally inexcusable waste of my time! The Rainbow is a special case, and that's why I'm admitting defeat. I mean, I'm still going to read the last 200+ pages, but the dream of somehow coming to appreciate it has been thanked for its time and released Marie Kondo-style into the universe. Maybe in ten years I'll try again.

Would you rather still be reading Giles Goat-Boy right now? Be honest.

No, not even Thomas Pynchon can make me wish I were still reading Giles Goat-Boy. But I do find myself thinking longingly of blank walls I might be staring at instead.

Not to be confused with the Doctor Who episode of the same name, or with River Song or the Aztec lady the Doctor accidentally marries in Season 1, The Doctor's Wife is an adultery story that begins with the title character's brother trying unsucessfully to locate her after she's left her husband, initially for a younger man, but eventually for herself.

There's a prologue where we learn that Sheila has disappeared, and the younger man doesn't know where she is any more than anyone else, and then it swings back in time to tell Sheila's story. What happens: Sheila and her husband Kevin are supposed to be on vacation in France. Sheila's there ahead of Kevin because he's had to stay behind to do doctor stuff, feeling a little relieved because Kevin is kind of a jerk who prides himself on his practicality and makes fun of her for liking books and wanting to go on vacations. She suspects he doesn't actually want to come at all. As a young girl she had some kind of a self or at least the beginnings of one, but she feels like everything interesting about her has been tamped down and soaked through by the dreary persistent drizzle of real life. She meets an attractive young American in Paris, a nice normal guy who shares some of her interests. They hit it off; she skips lunch with her old friend to spend the morning with him, and when she moves to Nice, he takes the train down to see her again.

One thing leads to another (another being plenty of sex) and after a few days Shelia decides she isn't going back. By end, she's removed herself completely from her old life, including her unhappy teenage son, to begin again on her own terms.

There's a move in this book I'm not sure how I felt about. ( This came as a surprise to me, so maybe it's a spoiler: ) But maybe I'm just being squeamish? Other than that I liked it pretty well, though I won't be naming any routers after it.

There are actually two doctors' wives in this book: Sheila and her brother's wife Agnes, whom we see from his perspective as nosy and meddling, as ill-matched to him as Sheila's husband is to her; you get the impression that he understands her disappearance more than he can say or think out loud.

What I've Finished Reading

A couple of 99 Novels that didn't leave a tremendous impression - Staying On is a very mildly comic blunderabout featuring saddish ex-Raj retirees who are about to get kicked out of their hotel, and their friends and acquintances. It was a little livelier than Life in the West, which I read all of very quickly in about the same frame of mind as I've heard stressed-out tech journalists describe the experience of reading Twitter: a half-bored, half-fixated twilight hunger. Not that I thought it was a bad book; I just got into that bag-of-chips airport mindset very early on and never managed to read it any other way. An ex-spy documentarian has trouble with his wife and feelings about human history. There's a lot of hanging around in hotels and lively perfunctory sex and smoking. It was all right, but I can't think of a single person I'd recommend it to - probably because I read it too fast, to be honest.

I am doing these books, which I mostly enjoyed, a disservice by dashing a handful of careless words over them, and probably doing another kind of disservice by squandering buckets of text on how much I don't get Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe I'm feeling more impatient than usual because. . .


It's The Final Countdown

There are now only NINE books remaining of the original 99 Novels. Should I slow down and take them one by one? Probably!

The Final Nine:
Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
The Doctor's Wife -- Brian Moore
Dubin's Lives -- Bernard Malamud
Riddley Walker -- Russell Hoban
Darconville's Cat -- Alexander Theroux
The Mosquito Coast -- Paul Theroux
Creation -- Gore Vidal
The Rebel Angels -- Robertson Davies
Ancient Evenings -- Norman Mailer

I'm going to miss this beautiful list (even if I don't miss Gravity's Rainbow).


What I'm Reading Now

Gravity's Rainbow, natch! (as Pynchon and the Rainbros would say - "natch," like "sez," is one of the Pynchster's creaky gonzo voice tics). I've just read back up to about the point I left off - the famous Gross British Candies Set Piece, in which Tyrone Slothrop, the American with the mysteriously prophetic erections, is force-fed a bunch of disgusting British candies by his girlfriend of the moment and her landlady. This sequence is a massive clattering verbal contraption that looks a little like it ought to be hilarious but isn't quite. Actually, some of the candies presented for my horrified amusement sound nice. I'd eat a wine jelly right now if I had one.

Anyway, as Marie Kondo says (or "sez"), all books come into our lives to teach us something. The lesson being slowly doled out by Gravity's Rainbow may be that you can't love every book, or even feel mildly entertained by every book, no matter how much you want to. Some books come into our lives to teach us that some doors stay closed.

What I Plan to Read Next

Three new 99 Novels from the library, making up 1/3 of the total remaining! Riddley Walker, The Doctor's Wife, and Dubin's Lives. They are all of them not Gravity's Rainbow and I'm looking forward to reading them. I also picked up a poetry book called You Are Not Stendhal, which has nothing to do with anything, but I saw the title and immediately thought "YOU DON'T KNOW ME" and therefore had to take it home. I have to admit that the author does have me pegged in one very specific respect.