Madwoman in the Attic

From Denmark to the Deep South: Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike and The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

So the search for great reads continues, against all the odds (I live without the benefit of either a library or real bookstore) and in spite of numerous disappointments (see entry dated October 8th below).

Did I get lucky? Well, yes and no. That is, I didn't read anything that made me want to throw it across the room. (Not idle talk: I actually did throw a book across the room once, and it was The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, which shall probably cement my Philistine status in the eyes of many, but that is a review for another time, if ever). I was entertained and didn't feel that I'd utterly wasted my time. Those things alone are starting to feel like luxuries these days. Vive la entertaining reads with actual plots.

The decision to pick up John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius was something of a no-brainer: for a fan of both Shakespeare and Updike's iconic Rabbit series, the combination is irresistible.

Updike doesn't disappoint: his prose, melded here into ornate, archaic shapes, is as gorgeous as ever. He takes advantage of the medieval milieu to make use of the fantastic imagery of fairy tales--a striking contrast to the bleak imagery of his contemporary work--while at the same time weaving a tale of contemporary sophistication. Very little actually happens, as the novel is meant as a prelude to the play.  And perhaps the greatest weakness of the novel lies in its being entirely dependent upon a different (and world-famous) work of literature.

But Updike is no fool: he doesn't attempt to escape the monolithic shadow cast by Shakespeare, which is ultimately inescapable. Rather he uses the shadow to his advantage in a variety of ways. The most obvious way is  in a subversion of the readers' expectations: as it turns out, the weak-willed Gertrude portrayed by Shakespeare has a strong, passionate heart and a core of utter decency in her depiction by Updike; Claudius is a tortured man who commits murder chiefly to protect the woman he loves (or so he tells himself, at least). More outrageously, Hamlet is a whiny, pretentious prig and his father would drive anyone mad if he hung about as a ghost. Polonius and Ophelia are the only characters who are essentially the same in both depictions, the strongest thread of commonality to bind the two works aside from the obvious initial connection.

But if that were the only way in which Updike played off of Shakespeare, any mediocre writer could achieve the same thing: the shock effect. It is the subtleties that make this work impressive, the way Updike uses our familiarity with the story of Hamlet to challenge the readers' perspectives. We see the same court, the same castle in Gertrude and Claudius as we see in Hamlet, but this time it is through the calm eyes of the imprisoned, thoughtful queen. Her ruminations on a woman's role in the medieval world lend an edge of poignancy to this tale and show the play in a new light.  The relationship between Gertrude and Claudius, rather than being a tawdry fling, is a touchingly developed love story that veers away from Updike's usual embrace of the flesh; it takes many, many meetings and searching conversations before they will consummate the act. And lastly but perhaps most significant of all, Gertrude's grief at the death of her husband is real.

All of this conspires to raise the idea that perhaps the secrets that Hamlet so determinedly unearths in the course of the play are not really his affair at all; that perhaps they, like Yorick's skull, should have been allowed to remain peacefully buried. In short, Updike takes a medieval tale--with all the misogyny and crudity inherent in such a tale--and turns upon it the light of his insight to reveal  subtle shades and aching moral dilemmas.

In the end, while Updike cannot and does not even try to surpass Hamlet, the sense of tragedy at the end of Gertrude and Claudius does surpass that of play--because two middle-aged people who are deeply in love are far more sympathetic than a self-involved young intellectual, when all is said and done. And because Updike has evoked so beautifully the musical sounds of the rain, the scent of spring awakening, that accompanies this love in its beginning and fades so tragically by the end in castle  intrigues and the scent of death.

It may seem unfair to write about Donna Tartt and John Updike in the same post, but the truth is that I would never do Tartt the disservice of comparing them. My expectations from The Little Friend were entirely different from my expectations of an Updike novel: I hoped to be intelligently but thoroughly entertained.

Beginning with a child's brutal murder and plunging the reader into a world of childhood trauma and dysfunction, this wasn't quite what I was expecting. The setting has a noir-ish quality, particularly in the way that so many of the characters are hard-nosed and indifferent to the plight of a little girl.  The novel flashes back and forth between Harriet's world--with her negligent mother, traumatized sister, and insensitive grandmother and aunts--to the underworld of the little Mississippi town in which she lives; ironically, the naked immorality of the criminal world is subtly mirrored in the milieu of the upper crust, in which a child can seem cared for but is really for all intents and purposes abandoned.

Harriet, being aware that her home was different before her older brother was murdered, decides to find the murderer--and kill him. In an early twist, it becomes clear that this is not a mystery--Harriet is not really committed to proving the identity of the killer, only to fastening guilt on someone who comes to embody all the horrors of her own life. Consequently, we never get any clues to the murder, only a chronology of Harriet's attempts at vigilante "justice." Along the way, we see Harriet flailing for love, love of any kind; and the reader knows that love would defuse Harriet's obsession in an instant.

The novel is compelling at first, but it begins to wear thin near the middle and never picks up after that. The problem is that while the premise and its execution are both absorbing, there is too much of the same repeated over and over again. At the beginning, we can intuit that Harriet is depressed and feels unloved; near the middle, the author seems worried that we may not have picked this up and begins to articulate it, thereby losing the atmospheric power of that which is left unsaid. And while Harriet's world, in all its grim and grey dimensions, is fascinating, the criminal underworld is surprisingly banal. Those sections, given their banality, go on way too long.

Perhaps the most notable thing about The Little Friend is that both hunter and "killer"--one an upper-class  child, one a "white trash" criminal--are shown to be  moving in parallel paths despite the surface differences. They have both been deprived of any nurturing, so that criminal enterprises became an escape from the world. Harriet, in attempting to kill Danny Ratliff (the alleged murderer) is in fact stalking her own shadow.

It's a clever idea--and at about 200 pages shorter, would have been well-executed on top of that. As it is, I can't really recommend this book, but I will be checking out Tartt's other work.

   

The Sky is No Limit

The experience of seeing Stardust in the theaters recalled to me the reason for going to the theater in the first place: to get lost. And in a film that so expertly veers between suspense, wit, and heartfelt sweetness, getting lost is both inevitable and a pleasure. An intoxicating array of fantastic and epic elements are freewheelingly employed: romance, battles and intrigues for succession, the faerie realm, witchcraft, pirates...and skimmed on top, a layer of sparkling creativity that makes each of these elements fresh and entertaining rather than plot devices meant to draw crowds.

The seven princes who are at loggerheads for the throne have a hilariously, disturbingly violent culture that culminates in one of the running gags of the film, wherein the ghosts of offed princes stick around to chat (and  comment on the events of the living in much the same way that beer-bellied men shout vainly at sports games from the stands).  The pirate captain, played by Robert De Niro, sets up one of the funniest movie situations I've ever seen. The character brings homosexuality into the film--which reminds us that it's 2007--in the most heartwarming and funny way possible rather than as a ponderous nudge at political correctness.

A number of reviewers have compared Stardust to The Princess Bride, but I think that they are not quite on the same level. Stardust is in some ways more completely entertaining than The Princess Bride, but I highly doubt that the former will ever have a similar cult following. There are no lines of dialogue that are so utterly memorable as to spawn in-jokes for the next twenty years--let's face it, William Goldman is a wordsmith to be reckoned with.  Stardust is a remarkably fun, engaging film, but it's not going to change the world. The traditional fairy tale themes are preserved too entirely to be truly innovative--the plot is fun but it is also utterly predictable.

It is possible that Stardust will change the way moviemakers approach fantasy, and help them to realize that fairy tale elements don't need hefty doses of satire to be palatable to contemporary audiences. On the other hand, probably not--the success of the film, if it is successful, will most likely be ascribed to Michelle Pfeiffer's  gorgeousness (which is considerable) and Claire Danes's form-fitting gown.

What I like most about Stardust is that finally we have a  postmodern fairy tale in the best sense of the term; one that cleverly incorporates contemporary sensibilities and humor while still preserving the essential beauty--which exists even in darkness--that is the core element of fairy tales. It's not as if we don't know what will happen from the start; it's unlikely that there is anyone watching the film who expects the main character to end up with the supercilious Victoria. In the final half hour of the film, it's unlikely that the suspense is real for most viewers concerning the fates of the main character and his love. But instead of sneering at the conventions of fairy tales or at best drenching them in irony, as most contemporary fairy tales are wont to do, Stardust pays loving homage to the genre while at the same time giving us a gay pirate captain. The combination is simultaneously relatable and beautiful, as fairy tales should be.

Fed Up With Contemporary Literature: The Roundup

It might seem like the epitome of self-indulgence to devote an entire post to my dissatisfaction with a number of books, but there is actually a point to this.

Drumroll, please, as we begin with...

The History of Love pulls the reader in with exquisitely wrought language and a heartbreaking concept. What it appears to be, at the start, is a postmodern angle on the Holocaust--instead of dwelling on the details as many, many other novels and films have done in the past, the focus is instead on the far-reaching consequences whose tragedy is none the less wrenching for being muted.  Simultaneously, a plethora of characters are introduced, one of whom is the author of the novel-within-the-novel, The History of Love.  As the plot unfolds, twists, and folds again, it becomes at once the mystery of who wrote History, and an exploration of the psyche of Leopold Gursky--a Holocaust survivor whose former love married another man--and the girl Alma, who was named for the magnetic  protagonist in the novel-within-the-novel.

I could explicate and analyze every plot twist of this book, but other reviewers have done that already, and it's not necessary. The problem with this book lies at its heart, not in the individual strands of the tapestry that Krauss took such pains to weave.  More to the point, the problem is that the overt complexity of the plot acts as a mask to conceal the emptiness underneath. Line by line, the prose is expertly written (if a bit precious and overworked at times). The tone of the novel is unquestionably intelligent. But all these elements are coming together as if by rote. The elderly escapades of Leopold Gursky are too reminiscent of Philip Roth's iconic anti-heroes, and without the underlying sense of purpose that gives Roth's novels their poignancy.  Krauss's characters, like dutiful Literary Figures, go through the motions of being exactly that. The book ultimately trails away into emptiness in a chain of pointless "revelations" precisely because it never had any underlying meaning in the first place. Various "themes" are introduced, certainly, but not in a genuinely profound manner. They are the same themes that recur throughout literature--mortality, lost love, the innate tragedy of innocence--but it feels like they are there because Literature demands their presence rather than because they grew organically from within the text.

And this is the peril of contemporary, so-called literary fiction: the emphasis is on style, an illusion of depth, characters doing little, often eccentric things that are symbolic or are intended to contain hidden meaning. But too often there is no depth at all, and the lack of a plot is not because the book is too intelligent to need one, but because Plot is apparently a bourgeois device that pales in comparison to intensive, unending introspection. Yet I'd argue that few books are better off for being aimless and preoccupied with themselves. Plot can act as a catalyst to plumb the depths of a theme--in fact that is why we have stories in the first place. The power of storytelling since the beginning of human speech has been, I would argue, in the themes that dance in and out of the shadows; a dance whose beauty comes from its combination of deliberate art and spontaneity. Dwelling consciously and exclusively on theme leaches the power of stories, as well as the potential for exploration in the most elusive and profound territory--that of the unconscious mind.

As a result, The History of Love is a poster child for the worst of what contemporary literary fiction has become--empty, navel-gazing, but ornate and falsely contemplative on its  surface.

So now that I've made my spiel, it's probably clear where I'm going with this. Because Ann Patchett's The Patron Saint of Liars is another such example: a beautifully written, intricately wrought novel about nothing. Or more accurately, the story of a pregnant woman who leaves her husband in order to escape her dissatisfaction with the marriage. The opening chapters explore her childhood and the people in her life with thorough and loving detail; these chapters are a pleasure to read. It is a pitfall of contemporary literature, however, that its authors delight in description for its own sake, without giving sufficient thought to where they are taking the reader and why. In this case, the result is that the main character, who seemed so eager to escape the shackles of marriage, is only exchanging one set of shackles for another: for the rest of the novel she consigns herself to a dull, sterile existence as the cook in the home for pregnant women that she escaped to. She gets herself into another, even more loveless marriage than the first. She serves as a cold and ungenerous mother figure to her child. Yet with all this, people love her, possibly because she is physically beautiful.

The reader is certainly given no hint as to why anyone would love someone who is so purposefully aimless and self-centered. She has deliberately closed herself off even from the the mother she loves, and we are never given the faintest clue why she even bothered to run away from her empty marriage if it was to enter into a similar one and become joylessly obsessed with cooking. There is--surprise!--no plot whatsoever. We see this uninteresting character from the perspective of the man she married and her unfortunate daughter, we see how she affects them--far more profoundly than she deserves--and then she is gone, and it's hard to understand why anyone would care.

Patchett in general has this problem, as it was manifest in The Magician's Assistant as well: she has characters doing unconventional things, like choosing to live with a man who will never love you back, or taking off to become a taciturn cook for the rest of your life, but without providing the slightest inkling of motivation for these actions. It's as if she believes that the actions are already so interesting as to be sufficient material for a story, apparently without realizing that actions that have no seeming motivation are not interesting, but merely confusing. Maybe it's the postmodern addiction to quirkiness playing itself out here, but in that case the quirks are taken too seriously to be either charming or ironic,  and those are the only legitimate purposes that quirkiness serves.

And now we come to The Game by A.S. Byatt. Yes, it's an early work, but it's been reprinted in a beautiful Vintage edition, and besides--it's A.S. Byatt, rendering it Great Contemporary Literature almost by default. But, as Nicole Krauss would so stylistically say: and yet. This is essentially a Tale of Two Beeyotches that masquerades as a profound meditation on illusion and self-deception. Or rather, it is a meditation on those things, but it is not particularly profound.

The two sisters around whom the story revolves are both self-involved, but one is a frustrated, passionate academic while the other is a status-seeking, self-deceiving, shallow writer of self-centered potboilers. Guess which one has Byatt's sympathy.  But both of them are types, intellectual constructs meant to aid the author in her cool, delicately written exploration of her chosen themes. The language is convoluted, the novel peppered with philosophical ponderings, yet in the end--who gives a damn? Why the game is even mentioned, let alone the title of the novel, is purely a symbolic conceit; the game is never fleshed out enough to be plausible as the catalyst of so much pain and dysfunction. The book is old enough that the television is used as a representation of the power of illusion, rather than being a simple fact of life. Everything in the book is a carefully chosen symbol, all the conversations are meant to contribute to the themes.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but in this particular case, the subject matter is simply not as deep as the author seems to think. What is real? How much of our lives are preoccupied with illusion, and can illusion wreck a human life? Interesting question. I'd rather watch the Matrix again, though, than slog through this arched-eyebrow, pretentious and repetitive  contribution, which says a great deal but doesn't convey any genuinely powerful ideas.

Does that make me  anti-intellectual? I'm sure some would say so. In my opinion, though, such cool discussion actually evades real discussion; the words are an intricate web of craft without substance or daring. Powerful art must come from the gut as well as from the mind; it is that synthesis which makes it art rather than academia or philosophy. Pure gut, and you get a Mary Higgins Clark or Danielle Steel; but pure mind, on the other end of the spectrum, is bloodless and without impact. Meat and wine can each be enjoyed separately; but put them together and you have a meal, and at last--true satisfaction.

I am Woman, Hear Me Laugh: Erica Jong's Fear of Flying

As a rule, feminism is not funny. At one end of the spectrum is Virginia Woolf's cool, logical yet impassioned essay "In Search of a Room of One's Own" (which is required reading, by the way) while at the other end...ever see Jennifer Lopez in the movie Enough? Where she takes self-defense classes so she can learn how to trounce her misogynist pig 0f a wife-beating ex-husband? There's the pouty, trembling lips, the enraged hiiiiiya as the aforesaid pig gets what is coming to him (I hope I didn't spoil it for anyone), but there are certainly no laughs to be had. The presumption is that the woman is a victim and therefore must be taken very, very seriously. 

All art by marginalized groups is in danger of falling into this trap, and my argument is that few attitudes are more crippling to an artist than a sense of victimhood. The world shrinks into an enclosed microcosm of suffering, the victimizers are inevitably portrayed as caricatures, and feelings of deprivation rapidly take the form of petulance. Even worse is when the artist's motives are hijacked by a "cause"--then all you're getting is the party line. These views are in no way intended to diminish the severity of social injustice; however when Virginia Woolf claimed that the literature of nineteenth century women was often flawed by deep-seated rage and feelings of inferiority, she makes a compelling case.

With this in mind, I avoided Erica Jong--who in recent decades morphed into a feminist icon--for years, thinking I'd be in for a very serious story about a seriously disenfranchised woman who rebelled against the system of Dead White Male Oppression (TM). If I'd had any idea how shockingly self-aware and how downright hilarious Fear of Flying would be, I'd have read it much sooner. Isadora White thinks and talks like a true New Yorker, with no nonsense and a painful awareness of her classically Jewish neuroses. Her voice is also distinguished by an endearing lack of self-pity most of the time. This is a girl who grew up rich and materially spoiled and is feeling lost for no discernible reason, and the author doesn't attempt to obscure those facts by creating a history of tragic abuse for the character to wallow in. The result is an honest look at the challenges facing women on a purely existential level--the ones that continue to plague women to this day. This is not just a book for the '70s.

Isadora White is as self-absorbed (and ultimately as selfish) as Carrie Bradshaw any day, but with an important difference: she is self-aware. The self-deprecating tone is surprising at times, as it seems like a strange position for someone who is known as a feminist to take. But that tone ends up working in the characters' favor; any potential criticism of Isadora is immediately carried out by the character herself, who can see the flaws in her logic and in her behavior but still feels compelled to continue that behavior. The analysis as to whether that behavior is justified in any way, or is purely selfish, is far more honest than one would expect, and elicits no easy answers for the reader or for Isadora herself.

Where the book falls short is that it has a very autobiographical feel, and as a result, events in the book occur very much as they do in real life: haphazardly and without structure. As a portrayal of a realistic scenario, Fear of Flying works well enough; but my view is that fiction that concerns itself with what actually happened in "real life" is too limited to create a story of real depth. For genuine exploration, a writer must venture into the caverns of what might have been; and a character who is supposed to replicate any existing individual, even (or especially?) the author, is limited from the start. But the book is a fun read and written in prose that sparkles with wit and honesty; it made me laugh out loud.

The Critics Are Right, but I'm Still Feeling the Love: Thoughts on Spiderman 3

I have long been an unabashed fan of the Spiderman movies. In my view they stand head and shoulders above all their spandex-and-CGI counterparts. While Batman Begins garnered much praise for being "dark" and the X-Men movies had decent acting, these movies were too busy delivering fast thrills to pay attention to characters and themes. In contrast, Spiderman is from beginning to end all about the travails of being human, and executed with such delicacy and humor that the action, while engaging at times, exists to heighten the drama rather than to provide it in the first place.

The third installment is definitely the weakest, as many critics have said. There are too many villains, and at least two of them--the black ooze from space and Topher Grace with a bad haircut--fall into the story so arbitarily that it's almost silly. The writing doesn't always have the nuance of the previous movie, where the hand of Michael Chabon was beautifully in evidence. And the first half of the movie juggles so many disconnected elements that it's hard to see how the ending can possibly justify the buildup.

However. What this movie never does is wander off into a CGI-packed wonderland that forsakes character development for explosions, as so many other movies of its kind would do. Raimi demonstrates once again that what interests him the most is the human element, with every character--even the most minor--asserting some level of importance simply by virtue of being human. This is made most apparent with the villains, all of whom are driven by motives that are on some level justifiable--there is no one to purely hate. Harry is, at worst, deeply misguided; and the Sandman is a classic case of a man who blundered too deep into crime to find his way out. Eddie Brock, a deeply unlikeable photographer who competes with Peter and later becomes yet another villain, is driven to cartoon evil by genuine despair and failure. Peter's conflicts with these villains evoke a measure of internal conflict in the viewer.

But this is the heavy stuff, and it would be a pity if I neglected to mention the delightful J.K. Simmons returning for another hilariously cantankerous stint as editor of The Daily Bugle; then there's his secretary who has a soft spot for Peter, Peter's Russian landlord who gives him vintage Old World advice about women, and the landlord's daughter who provides many moments of sweetness and humor. That's leaving out the main actors, because there's really no need to mention them; but perhaps it should be noted that Harry's vulnerability is particularly affecting.

The major theme of Spiderman 3, when it emerges, is that there is a fine line between a hero and a villain, and Peter spends most of the movie teetering on the brink. A common comic book theme and executed reasonably well when the plot isn't dithering too much; but for me the best moments were the tiny human details: the sly French maitre d' who conspires with Peter in his proposal to MJ, the way Peter echoes the thoughts of many viewers after one of his encounters with the Sandman, as he shakes the sand out of his clothes and mutters "Where do all these guys keep coming from?" In acting there is the concept of "the moment before," when the character is inspired to action; Raimi often focuses on the moment after, the less dramatic but intensely real aftermath.

And like the previous two movies, Spiderman 3 is a love song to New York, depicting the city as a mythic realm both of opportunity and deadly loneliness--a place where superheroes are needed most.