#20: Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is a book of essays original published in various magazines. A few of the essays are purely personal—one is about the time his brother was electrocuted by a guitar amplifier and experienced a temporary personality change, another about how Sullivan allowed his house to be used as the setting for a TV show for a couple of years.

But the majority of the essays were likely the results of assignments, like: “Go see what this Christian rock festival is like,” or “Go talk to these guys who are exploring prehistoric Indian caves in Tennessee,” or “Go interview Bunny Wailer, the last surviving member of Bob Marley’s band.”

For either type of essay, Sullivan has wit, charm, and intelligence to spare. I cannot help but envy Sullivan’s writing. I want to analyze his sentences, the way a guitar player might want to play Jimi Hendrix’s solos over and over again at slow speeds. How does he do it? Here he is explaining why he felt the need to buy a house when his wife was eight months pregnant:

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said,” that way they caint get ye with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tatoos, but he told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience, “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones.

Sometimes Sullivan writes in the pure third-person, as when he analyzes Michael Jackson’s life and times in a poignant and highly empathic essay:

Michael finds himself back in the old Motown building for a day, doing some video mixing, when Berry Gordy approaches and asks him to be in the twenty-fifth-anniversary special on NBC. Michael demurs. A claustrophobic moment for him. All that business, his brothers, Motown, the Jackson 5, the past: that’s all a cocoon he’s been writhing inside of, finally chewing through. He knows that “Billie Jean” has exploded; he’s becoming something else. But the animal inside him that is his ambition senses the opportunity. He strikes his legendary deal with Gordy, that he’ll perform with his brothers if he’s allowd to do one of his own solo, post-Motown hits as well. Gordy agrees.

More often Sullivan plays a role in these odd tales, either a supporting role or a starring one. In the first essay, the one about the Christian rock festival, he describes how he has had to rent a 29-foot motor home to attend the festival (“do you want to know what it’s like to drive a windmill with tires down the Pennsylvania Turnpike at rush hour by your lonesome, with darting bug-eyes and shaking hands?”). Once on site he bonds with a group of guys from West Virginia. Sullivan makes it clear that he is not now an evangelical Christian, but during the course of his story he reveals that he was one for a time in high school. His involvement with the West Virginians seems intended to prove, both to them and to us, that he is not some effete liberal snob come to rain contempt on the ignorant evangelicals. Almost instinctively, I was waiting for a bit of such disdain—maybe not in pure form, but perhaps admixed with bits of respect and bemusement. It isn’t that he isn’t able to admire bits of absurdity here and there, but overall the article is as much about Sullivan’s own quest for spiritual sustenance as it is about the seekers, hucksters, and crackpots he meets.

#19: Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Genre fiction! But which genre, exactly?—that’s the tricky part. “Speculative fiction” is one term I’ve seen in a couple of places. But what exactly is speculative fiction?—I think it’s fiction that seems sort of like science fiction, but isn’t quite. I guess that’s an adquate category, except what fiction isn’t speculative—if it isn’t speculative, is it fiction? Stephenson’s books are chock full of science and are written with a pronounced scientific orientation, but they aren’t set in the future and they lack any of the obvious hallmarks of the science fiction genre—space travel, aliens, sentient robots that want to rebel against their human masters, etc. They’re genre fiction, but they’re not formulaic.

Here’s how I came to read this book. Two and a half years ago when we were living in Denmark an English-language bookstore opened in a neighborhood near us. Of course we were there the week they opened. But they only had maybe 85 books in the place and they were all $30 or $40 each. But we got to talking with the owners and one of them saw me looking at a 900-page Neal Stephenson novel with a very pretty cover. He said it was a wonderful book and guaranteed I would love it too. I wasn’t so sure but I wanted to be agreeable and we did want to support the venture, so I bought it. A few months later I picked it up and read it. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. This was volume one in what is called “The Baroque Cycle,” set in the late 17th and early 18th century. Full of details about various scientists and scientific trends of the times—also full of adventure and entertaining characters. Over the course of a few months I purchased and read all three novels in the cycle—each about 900 pages long.

Cryptonomicon is set in the 20th century and was written before the Baroque Cycle, but its characters are the decendants of the characters in the Baroque Cycle, so it’s a kind of a prequel, except that it was written first (1998).

Same basic formula—a dollop of science education (mostly cryptography in this case), plus a cast of characters pursuing different adventures that eventually turn out to be related. About half the book is set during World War II; the rest in the “present day.” The present day parts funtion in part as a kind of advertisement for the wonders of technology circa 1998. It’s funny how dated this part of the book, which deals with internet technologies and entrepreneurship, now feels. It’s pre-Google! It doesn’t help that it’s written with a kind of gee-whiz “we are the techo-elite” kind of boastfulness.

But now that’s I’ve taken a potshot at Stephenson, I have to confess that I have been impressed and entertained by his books. They’re like big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas, full of glitzy special effects, clever dialogue and farfetched, intricate plots. Except they were written by one guy sitting in a room. A much better carbon footprint.

#18: The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes

The word “scientist” was coined at the third annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Cambridge in 1833. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among the attendees. At issue was what to call someone who works in the “real sciences.” Up to that point, “natural philosopher” was the preferred term for someone who attempted to learn and manipulate the laws of nature. Things were happening in Europe during the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century to make this new term necessary. Exceptional minds had always been able to see hidden realities, but now, during the so-called Romantic Age, science became a method, a profession, a systematic assault on the natural world. For the first time, it was understood that matter consisted of elements which could be identified. This was chemistry. The study of rocks revealed billions of years of earth history. This was geology. And the study of the sky revealed that space was essentially limitless and contained enormous collections of stars that we now call galaxies. This was astronomy.

Richard Holmes is known for writing biographies of poets from the Romantic age such as Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I’d read several of his books and found him a congenial, well informed, and sympathetic presenter of these lives. I’m not really intrepid enough to read much poetry on my own, so sometimes I read biographies of poets as a way to immerse myself in the sensibilities of poets—and then maybe even go on and read a few of their poems.

In The Age of Wonder, Holmes reviews the history of British science from 1770 to 1830 through the lives of some of the leading natural philosophers of the day; most especially through two: astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphry Davy. These names would only have provoked the faintest glimmer of recognition before I read this book. They were giants in their time but these names do not resonate like Isaac Newton or Galileo Galilei. There are many possible reasons for this, but one is that Herscel and Davy were not lone, exceptional geniuses, but rather members of a vanguard in the development of science, the foremost among many. Their lives are fascinating and complex but they were public men who cannot be separated from the fabric of their time.

Herschel was an astronomer who built his own telescopes and searched and mapped the skies relentlessly for decades. He was the first to really understand the sky in three dimensions and to grasp the overall structure of the universe. Along the way he discovered numerous comets and the planet Uranus, which he originally named Georgium Sidus in honor of the reigning monarch. Humphry Davy was a chemist, but more than that he was the personification of the idea of a “scientist” before the term existed. He experimented with inhaling gases and had a brief but intense flirtation with nitrous oxide that could almost have made him the Timothy Leary of his day. He became a charismatic celebrity who gave very popular lectures on new trends in science, and his very interest in a field, be it the isolation and identification of new elements or the development of batteries and the field of “electro-chemistry,” helped to speed its development. Davy’s greatest triumph was not only a scientific coup but a public relations coup as well. After a series of mine explosions in the north Midlands, Davy was asked to bring his skill on the problem and did so by inventing a new kind of mining lamp that would not interact with the methane gas in the mines. Davy discovered that a metal mesh around a lamp’s flame would prevent explosions. He was hailed as a national hero. The personification of science triumphant.

Davy’s fame did go to his head somewhat. In later years he was much disliked by younger colleagues who resented his unwillingness to share credit and acknowledge the contributions of others, among them his assistant Michael Faraday, who went on to succeed Davy as the preeminent public scientist of his day.

Almost two hundred years later, science has taken us to places that Herschel and Davy could not have imagined. Science has been weaponized and can create plagues and send “drones” to kill people from thousands of miles away. In The Age of Wonder, science poses a different threat, which is the increasing marginalization of God in the affairs of man. Some still hoped that science could find some evidence of the divine—an animating fluid that bridged the gap between chemistry and electricity on one side and mind and soul on the other. This was the debate that led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1815. Would the secret of life fall so easily to science? And what is life without divine guidance?

I wonder if maybe the period that Holmes describes was the first time in the history of civilization that it was possible to consider one’s self an atheist. The first time it was possible to expect there to be a physical, materialist explanation for everything one could experience. Of course once atheism and materialism exist, then so does fundamentalism which is, among other things, a refusal to accept materialist explanations for everything we experience. As I write this, newspapers are full of news about the discovery of an elementary particle called the “god particle,” which also goes by the name of the Higgs boson. I’m sure there are millions of people—especially in America—who think this discovery proves the existence of God.

#17: 2666, Roberto Bolaño

This is a wonderful, strange 900-page book that I’ve been living with for the past couple of months. I’d read one previous book by Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, two or three years ago and liked it a lot. 2666 is a bit intimidating—it consists of five loosely related parts that are only linked to each other in very oblique ways. The five parts almost read like separate books, and in fact Bolaño, before his death in 2003, requested that they be published separately. But his editors or executors decided to publish the five parts as one book, and I think they made the right decision.

Bolaño was a poet and literary/political iconoclast until he turned 40, at which time, after marrying and having children, he turned to novel writing as a way to provide for his family. This is how his wikipedia article describes it:

He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño said that he began writing fiction because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet.

What a ridiculous notion, that someone would compromise himself for money by….writing strange oblique literary novels. As if the the world were insatiable for such things.

2666 is the farthest thing from a pot boiler. If you stay with it it’s because you enjoy the journey and not because you’re expecting a stunning resolution. From the beginning, it’s abundantly clear that this tour bus will not be taking you to any of the usual roadside attractions. But if the grand concept of the book is a bit remote, the writing is always clear, witty, and entertaining. I never felt confused or disoriented while reading 2666. It’s a weird and eerie book whose mysteries and enigmas are unmistakably deliberate.

= = = = =

The fourth section of 2666, which is the longest, gives us four years’ worth of murders in the city of Santa Teresa, in northern Mexico. This section closely follows real events in the actual city of Cuidad Juarez, where hundreds of women have been killed since the early 1990s. Most of the victims were young factory workers, and the murders usually involved sexual assault.

It is unquestionably hard to read paragraph after paragraph of the following sort for almost 300 pages:

The next dead woman was found near the Hermosillo highway, five miles from Santa Teresa, two days after Lucy Anne Sander’s body turned up. The discovery fell to four ranch hands and the ranch owner’s nephew. They had been searching for runaway cattle for more than twenty hours. The five trackers were on horseback, and when they could see that it was a dead woman, the nephew sent one of the hands back to the ranch with orders to tell the boss, while the rest of them stayed behind, perplexed by the bizarre position of the body. Its head was buried in a hole. As if the killer, clearly a lunatic, had thought it was enough to bury the head. Or as if he’d thought that by covering the head with earth the rest of the body would be invisible. The body was facedown with its hands pressed to its body. Both hands were missing the index and little finger. There were stains of coagulated blood in the chest region. The woman wore a light dress, purple, the kind that fastens in front. She wasn’t wearing stockings or shoes. In the subsequent forensic examation it was determined that despite multiple cuts to the chest and arms, the cause of death was strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. There was no signs of rape.

There are perhaps sixty or eighty such descriptions in part four of 2666. Some are not as grisly as the preceding; some are more grisly. So how, you may be wondering, does that make for a good read? Well, there is more to the tale than just murders. For one thing, there are the stories of the people in Santa Teresa whose lives are affected by the murders. There are the affecting and tragic stories of the murdered women and their families. We read so many such accounts that we develop a sort of feel for what life is like in Santa Teresa—the maquilladoras, or factories, where young women from all over Mexico come for grim, oppressed, low-paying jobs that they feel lucky to have. We read of the the garbage dumps and arid fenced spaces where the bodies are found, of the hapless, casually corrupt cops who come to realize that the person or persons responsible for these crimes have better connections than they do, and of the journalists who investigate the crimes and become unnerved by the all-encompassing malevolence of Santa Teresa, where violence almost seens to condense out of the polluted atmosphere.

But there is more even than that. There are threads of strange stories through this part of 2666, like the story of the cop who falls in love with an older woman who is the director of an insane asylum. Or the story of the gay reality show host who brings a psychic woman onto his show to speak about the evil that possesses Santa Teresa. It’s like a weird telenovela where stories and characters—and corpses—keep piling up. I was frequently reminded of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as I read this part of the 2666. Both demonstrate the ability to combine the macabre with the humorous and the mundane, as well as an indifference or even aversion to resolution.

Sometimes when I would pick up 2666 while I was reading this section I would be fascinated by one or another character or event. Other times I would be dismayed by the relentless sequence of forensic descriptions. Every three or four pages we read of another woman’s body thrown on some trash heap in the desert. The we read (sometimes) of who she was, where she lived, and what she did in the hours before her disappearance. These episodes take their toll, the reader grows restless and a bit distressed. Where are where going, how will it end? It does not go anywhere, it does not end, until this section ends, and then we breathe again.

Real live women are being raped and murdered in Cuidad Juazez to this day. It may even be that Bolaño has taken his details directly from the newspapers, that he is not inventing the grotesque details.

Each of the five parts of 2666 has its own mysteries and wonders—way too many for me to summarize. Each part has connections to one or more of the other parts. The two major focal points are the town Santa Teresa and a reclusive German author named Benno von Archimboldi. There are many threads that connect these two subjects, and yet when we finish the book we do not know for sure if Benno von Archimboldi has ever been to—or even heard of—Santa Teresa.

= = = = =

I’ve always loved the surrealistic tendencies of Latin American writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Julio Cortázar to Álvaro Mutis. I like Gabriel García Márquez too, though I am aware that “magical realism” has lost a lot of its luster these days, and to many suggests a kind of self-indulgent, insular writing. Here is Cormac McCarthy, quoted in Time magazine:

I’m not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible."

But terms like “surrealistic” and “magical realism” are imprecise terms for describing the particular quality of reality that an author creates. Inferior writers create inferior realities—they are like children playing with dolls. Great writers can take liberties with plot, characterization, and “prose style,” provided they can create first-class realities. Some writers aspire to create realities that do nothing to contradict the impression that they are equivalent to the reality we live in. This is called realism. But the world we live in and the world of a book can never be equivalent—trying to write a completely realistic novel is like trying to create a globe from a piece of paper. So what a gifted writer does is to warp the apparent reality of his or her book to evoke the three-dimensional reality of the world of people, places and things. That reality can never be fixed and unvarying, any more than a person’s mind and perceptions are fixed and unvarying. Or any more than one person’s reality can be empirically compared to another’s.

2666 offers a reality that’s often consistent and convincing, but it's an unstable reality, like some exotic element far down in the periodic table, and it is easily hijacked by dreams or digressions. It’s a haunted place. It reminds me a bit of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, where the frontier American settlers of planet Mars do not evict the aboriginal Martian residents so much as overwrite them. The Martians do not die, they fade. Like a radio station out on the prairie. In 2666, we read about a German soldier in Russia during World War II; that soldier finds the diary of a Russian writer hidden in a chimney and for the next 30 pages we are in the world of that Russian writer. When we finally return to the German soldier it’s like like waking from a dream—we are a bit bemused to find ourselves back where we started.

= = = = =

Some books stay with you, and some don’t. I think 2666 will stay with me. It has ballast, it felt real—I lived in this book for several weeks. What is it that gives some books the substance, the density to stay with us? What makes a book big? It’s not so much a matter of length but rather of the scope of the universe some books are able to create. Bolaño himself had an appreciation of such books; as one of the characters in 2666 muses:

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

I love books that are worlds unto themselves, places were I can go to live for a while. That have their own rules, customs, and logic. That reveal themselves, but do not explain themselves.

I think the effect is achieved in part using the literary equivalent of perspective, as per the painters of the Renaissance. When you look at Mediaeval paintings they are often beautiful, but their worlds seem small and flat because the painters did not understand perspective—vanishing points and so forth. Later artists could astonish us by creating apparently three-dimensional images that had a kind of visual gravity—the world behind the paint could almost compete with the one in front of it.

The universe of 2666 is made dense and three-dimensional by way the different sections of the books relate to each other in time and space. Certainly there are copious quantities of space and time involved—the action occurs in Russia, Europe, Mexico, and the United States, from the 1920s to the early 2000s. But there is also the matter of the way the sections relate to each other. It’s a kind of Stonehenge of a book, where we do not doubt that there is a pattern, a coherence of the whole, even though we cannot fully understand it. There are many enigmas; things are searched for and not found. Key characters are seen indirectly or not at all—not least the person or persons murdering so many women in Santa Teresa. There are also surprising convergences and coincidences—we read in the first section of a character who discovers a disturbing mirror in her hotel room that does not quite behave as the laws of optics prescribe and then, 500 pages later, in the fourth section, we read of another character who encounters such a mirror and we realize that it must be the same hotel room, even though our conception of the city has changed so much in the interval that we are a bit stunned to find ourselves back in the same place.

I think the book’s title is a bit of a nod to the idea of literary perspective—as though at some distant point in time, perhaps from Mars, we could see and understand everything.

#16: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis

Always wanted to read a Michael Lewis book, and now I have. It’s an account of the progress of the new depression as it effects five different countries: Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the good old USA. Partly I wanted the information: what is happening? How serious is it? Who’s to blame? And partly I just wanted to see what makes Lewis so popular.

It was a fun read. In Iceland, fisherman leave their boats to become bankers. In Greece, monks become millionaires by swinging shady real estate deals with the government. The world is not run by grown-ups, and those punished for sins are not necessarily those who have commited them.

Lewis always opts for the vivid character or the epigram over complexity or ambiguity. Scoundrels around the world have broughts scorn and ruin down on themselves and their nations. Cassandras have gone unheeded—except by Lewis, of course.

#15: see under: love, David Grossman

Such an unassuming title—see under: love. Makes me think of something intimate and tender for the Hallmark Channel—you know, poignant. I’d seen it in bookstores for years and had never been the least bit tempted. Then I read about its author, David Grossman, in an excellent New Yorker profile by George Packer—Grossman is Israeli, and plays a somewhat prominent part in leftist politics. According to Packer, see under: love had something to do with the holocaust and was the book that had made Grossman’s reputation in the late 1980s. So I decided to read it.

It was not poignant. It was a tornado—a little bit Kafka, a little bit Ulysses (Nighttown), a little bit … I don’t know what. I saw the word phantasmagoric used somewhere to describe it, and that hits the mark. I had about as much chance to comprehend the finer points of this book as George Bush had of comprehending the effects of Katrina as he flew over in his helicopter. I didn’t so much read see under: love as perform a reconnaisance. It’s a beast.

The book is divided into four sections, each so different that it could almost be its own book. The first part concerns Momek, a young boy growing up in Israel in 1959. He lives among a cast of older relatives who have barely managed to survive the holocaust. Most of them are damaged, some have lost their minds completely, like his great uncle Anshel Wasserman, who arrives in an ambulance one day. We see the world through Momek’s eyes as he tries to make sense of the human wreckage around him. He hears something about a “Nazi beast,” but, without having any hard information to go on, tries to figure out what this beast is and how to make it show itself. He goes so far as to imprison cats, birds, and mice in his basement with the notion that he can make the mysterious beast manifest itself from one of these animals.

In the later sections Momek has grown up to be Schlomo and is the author or at least the consciousness through whom the story passes. The second section is the phantasmagoric one. It has to do with Bruno Schultz, who was an interesting real-life writer and artist who had the misfortune to be Jewish in Poland in the early 1940s. He dies in a rather unusual way—here is how the event was described in the Grossman New Yorker profile:

…After a Jewish dentist in town was murdered by a German officer who had acted as Schulz’s protector, a German who had been the dentist’s protector shot Schulz, saying, “You killed my Jew—I killed yours.”

But in section 2 of see under: love, Shultz experiences an alternate reality—he escapes to Danzig, jumps into the Baltic and becomes a salmon. But that description is like the description of a dream—it grabs the most coherent detail but loses about 99.9% of the essence of the writing.

Most of the writers who incorporate fantastic or hallucinogenic elements into their work keep one foot in reality—Kafka, for example, is compelling in part because his characters are very orderly and earthbound, anxious to remain on the straight and narrow paths of their quotidian lives, even though they contend with dreamlike circumstances. In see under: love there is no such anchor in reality. You put the tab under your tongue and settle in:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the square, next to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, happier events were in progress: Edzio, the young cripple, swinging his muscular torso on crutches, finally met Adela face to face. Stout Edzio, whose cruel parents took his crutches away at night, and who dragged himself like a dog every night to Adela’s window, to press his deformed face against the pane, and watch the lovely servant girl in deep slumber, sprawling naked and moist for columns of bedbugs, wandering through the wilderness of sleep… He saw her, and she, without opening her eyes, saw him. And a small spark passed between them, with a trembling that shook the people all around. And they stood and stared at each other, and for a moment Adela’s eyes were opened: a thin white film—like the film over a parrot’s eye—was lifted, and light flashed, like a magnesium bulb. She saw his soul, understood the full force of his tragedy. She read the story of his nightly vigil over her dreams and felt the column of bedbugs turn to fingers of desire between her thighs. She contracted with pain and pleasure, and let him kiss her, in his thoughts, for the first time.

Those bedbugs—it’s like something out of Buñuel, or Dali. Edzio and Adela are in the book for about three pages and never appear again.

The third section describes the relationship between a Jewish children’s book author and a Nazi death camp commandant in 1943. (No turning back now…) The children’s book author is none other than Momek’s gibbering great uncle from the first section—Anshel Wasserman. We are given to understand that Momek—Schlomo—is inventing this history for his great uncle, and so we can tolerate a certain amount of … implausibility in the story. The commandant, Neigel, grew up reading Wasserman’s celebrated tales for children, known as The Children of the Heart.

Although there is still much to marvel at in the third section, my enthusiasm did begin to flag. The story is relentlessly extravagant and inventive, but is becoming a bit overwrought. It is not dramatically feasible to maintain such a high emotional pitch. Invention becomes tiresome when new characters and scenes keep emerging—really there are entire new books and universes erupting into the storyline.

Section four is in the form of an encyclopedia; it deals primarily with characters and events imagined by Neigel and Wasserman. The Children of the Heart live in a zoo in Warsaw. They have various mystical and magical talents. There are dozens of them. Every few minutes, I count how many pages I have left to read. I long to be done with see under: love.

#14: Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier

I first knew of Ian Frazier as the author of some very funny short magazine pieces such as Lamentations of the Father, in which a harried father hands down rules for his children in the diction of Jehovah (“Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room”) and Coyote vs. Acme, which takes the form of a legal brief prepared by a lawyer on behalf of Wile E. Coyote detailing in precise, dry legal language his client’s very specific complaints with the various products (such as rocket-powered roller skates) purchased from the Acme Corporation. There is a touch of genius in these pieces, in the way they work a simple conceit so flawlessly and so well. They’re like great jazz solos—they sustain an astonishing level of creativity for longer than you would think possible. If you haven’t read them, go find them.

Then one day about 10 years ago I picked up and started reading a book by Frazier entitled Family. I was surprised to discover that it was very earnest and serious. I would not go so far as to say it contained no wit or humor, but there wasn’t a single sentence in the book that was there just to be funny.

Family is a kind of extended personal history. Frazier’s parents both died relatively young, in their 60s, and within a short time of each other. It fell to Frazier to go through their apartment and sort through their effects. He dilated over this responsibility until it into a kind of hobby, and his sorting and organizing evolved into actual research, wherein he traced his origins back in various directions and in various ways. He wrote about his aunts and uncles and his childhood, but he also wrote about the regiment his hometown raised during the Civil War, and what became of various members of that regiment. I loved Family. I loved it for the way it turned a gentle current of curiosity into a substantial, interesting, and even profound book. I loved it for the way Frazier incorporated himself into the book as a kind of humble, rather hapless presence. The book isn’t a memoir, it isn’t about him—and yet it is about him. It’s about any- and everything that led to his existence.

I think Family was a kind of memorial to Frazier’s parents, an act of reverence and devotion. But in a very indirect and understated way.

Frazier has written several more nonfiction books since Family; his latest is entitled Travels in Siberia, and I just read it. Frazier has no organic reason to write about Siberia—it’s not his heritage or his destiny. It’s just a whim disguised as a career move—or vice versa. When Frazier wrote Family, I don’t think he knew that he would be making a career of book-length travel fiction. Now, after several books, I guess he felt it would be prudent, from a professional perspective, to break some new ground.

Which is not to make Frazier sound cynical. I can well understand getting bit by the Russia bug—it’s happened to me. I took three years of Russian language in college after discovering Tolstoyevsky in my teens. It’s hard for Americans to imagine Russia and the Russians, even though they were our rivals and presumptive enemies for five decades. Russia isn’t a developed first-world middle-class nation, any more than it’s a successful former colony like Brazil, or a poorer third-world country. It’s a primary, powerful place, an unconquerable empire, but it’s also shabby and ill-run. Whatever else it is, it demands to be taken on its own terms.

In Travels in Siberia, Frazier has retained much of the deliberate amateurism of Family. He is still very organic—that is, spontaneous and rather arbitrary in the way he goes about things. Much of the book is taken up with an account of his 5000-mile expedition across the breadth of Russia, from St. Petersburg on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific, in the company of two rather unobliging, not terribly professional guides, in a rent-a-wreck van. This lends a rather slapdash “road trip” quality to the story. Frazier is forever being abandoned at mosquito-ridden campsites while his guides rendezvous with ladies. Or kicking around in the weeds by the side of the road as they try to improvise a repair on their vehicle. He lets Russia happen to him, and he takes Russia at face value—one person at a time.

After his cross-country trip, Frazier returns a year or so later to experience Siberia in winter. He re-hires his guide Sergei, and once again their relations fluctuate between amicability and hostility. Sergei resents Frazier’s interest in Siberian labor camps—much as an American guide might resent a Russian author’s interest in the camps where Americans interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Of course, the latter was a brief episode involving several thousand people., whereas the Russians exiled many millions to Siberia over the course of a century and a half. Most died. Some settled and became Siberians. A few returned to European Russia in their old age. Frazier tells us of the mining camps of the Russian far east, where convicts labored in the most horrendous conditions and were housed and fed like animals. Very few survived.

Frazier and Sergei silently suspend their feud one evening as they explore an abandoned convict camp deep in the forest on a snowy -40˚ night. The camp has changed little in the decades since it was abandoned, and the contrast between the still beauty of the night and the wretched bare dormitories where the convicts lived is eerie. Frazier and Sergei are no longer American and Russian, they are just two people who have found a haunted place.

#13: Just Kids, by Patti Smith

There are two ways to be an artist. The first way is to be born with a fabulous talent, like a Mozart or a Picasso, and then to nurture and develop that talent. The second way is to know that you are an artist, and then to find some way to express that identity. Patti Smith is the second kind of artist. She achieved fame as a rock musician in the mid 1970s, yet for most of the years covered by this memoir (1967 to 1972) she never aspired to be a musician, and didn’t own or play an instrument. But she certainly knew that she was an artist.

The memoir deals with the years when Smith was living with fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. They were lovers and soul mates. Mapplethorpe ultimately found fame—and notoriety—as a photographer, but when he lived with Smith he had not yet found his art form either. They met in 1967, both poor and newly arrived in New York City. They spent their La Boheme years sketching and drawing; she wrote poetry, he crafted jewelry, collages, and tableaus a la Joseph Cornell. Their lives were precarious and difficult and Smith’s humble and plainspoken account is often very moving:

For the following weeks we relied on the generosity of Robert’s friends for shelter… Ours was an attic room with a mattress, Robert’s drawings tacked on the wall and his paintings rolled in a corner and I with only my plaid suitcase. I’m certain it was no small burden for this couple to harbor us, for we had meager resources and I was socially awkward.

Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDs in 1989, is known today for his brilliant and often shocking photography; he photographed flowers and friends, but also explicit sadomasochistic scenes. He was the occasion for a skirmish in the cultural wars back in the late 1980s, when Republican politicians objected to public arts funding for exhibits of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. (I remember my mother being incensed at the idea.)

Knowing of his future, we read Smith’s account of their time together as we might read of someone’s bringing home a lion cub for a pet—we know that their domesticity will not endure. Smith recognizes that Mapplethorpe is going through a metamorphosis:

He was searching, consciously or unconsciously, for himself. He was in a fresh state of transformation. He had shed the skin of his ROTC uniform, and in its wake his scholarship, his commercial path, and his father’s expectations of him.

Smith refuses to separate Mapplethorpe’s development as an artist from his progress toward recognizing and acknowledging his sexual identity. She will not acknowledge the tabloid mentality, will not present a standard “coming out” story, or retroactively pretend to understand what she did not fully understand at the time.

Smith and Mapplethorpe moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, years before either achieved fame, where they were able to establish themselves in New York art and music worlds. While she resided at the Chelsea, Smith met everyone from Salvador Dali to Allen Ginsberg to Janis Joplin. She visited William Burroughs in his apartment on the Bowery. Harry Smith, known as the man who put together the landmark Anthology of American Folk Music, which single-handedly kick started the folk revivial of the 1960s, became a friend. She had an affair with Sam Shepard and wrote a play with him—Cowboy Mouth, which I recently discovered takes its title from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Smith (Patti, not Harry) and Mapplethorpe start hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, where they were eventually given places at the celebrated round table, where they could rub elbows with Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and other Warhol "stars."

And then, they each find their niche. Smith begins giving poetry recitals with guitar backing. Over time, this evolves into a band. Mapplethorpe begins using a Polaroid to collect images for his collages; eventually the collages fall by the wayside. There is no single eureka moment, but there is a distinct sense of destiny arriving:

The Polaroid camera in Robert’s hands. The physical act, a jerk of the wrist. The snapping sound when pulling the shot and the anticipation, sixty seconds to see what he got. The immediacy of the process suited his temperament.

At first he toyed with the camera. He wasn’t totally convinced that it was for him. And film was expensive, ten pictures for about three dollars, a substantial amount in 1971. But it was some steps up from the photo booth, and the pictures developed unsealed.

And there we are. Mapplethorpe takes the iconic photo for the cover of Smith’s first album, Horses in 1974. After that, they more or less go their separate ways.

My friend Melanie once made me a Patti Smith tape and scribbled a quote from Lester Bangs on the cover: “What’s a Patti Smith album without some bullshit?” Smith can be naïve, cerebral, or fierce by turns. She speaks with a lower-middle-class South Jersey accent, yet she is a disciple of Verlaine and Rimbaud. I wonder what it would be like to have gambled everything on becoming who you are meant to be. Most of us just sort of happen—we have certain skills or talents and we use them to find a job that makes us enough money to pay the rent. We marry, have kids, buy a house. Patti Smith actually did go on to marry and have kids, which is a bit surprising in a way. She retired after just a few years in the spotlight. Now as she looks back, does she wonder who that person was who burned with such passion and ambition? Or has she always remained that person?

#12: Silence in October, by Jens Christian Grøndahl

Jens Christian Grøndahl has written almost 20 books in Danish; Silence in October is the first to be translated into English.

As Silence in October begins, a man has just been left by his wife. She has departed with little notice and no explanation. She doesn’t say where she is going, why, or for how long.

As the author mediates on his newfound solitude, his life slowly moves forward—he travels to New York for a few days, sees his daughter in a café, etc. But his thoughts dwell mostly in the past—he recalls how he met his wife, then an earlier love affair, then episodes from his childhood. He frames, separates, objectifies his experiences as he relives them. His memories are cinematic, visual, with no assumptions about what others were thinking or feeling—or even what he himself was thinking or feeling.

The narrator makes his living as an art critic, and reading Silence in October is a bit like looking at a cubist painting. The narrator is not just remembering his past, he is creating a kind of memory collage. Past events are introduced one by one, though not in strict chronological order, and then put into rotation with other memories, as though they were I-Pod songs playing in shuffle mode. There is an obsessive, repetitious quality to this:

wife has left – how they first met –wife has left – earlier affair – how they first met –wife has left –earlier affair – parents and childhood – wife has left – how they first met – earlier affair…

It’s like watching a juggler starting with three balls and then adding a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. But if the narrator is the juggler, he is not the one who decides which ball to introduce and when. That is Grøndahl’s doing.

This is a risky way to write--Grøndahl is daring the reader to be bored as his narrator circles relentlessly around his own life and realizes how little he understands anyone or anything. Sometimes the writing tries the reader’s patience:

Perhaps she also thought of the whirling fortuitousness of it all, and perhaps with the years she thought that it is not the paths and the faces that make a difference, the paths that open out all the time in all directions, the faces that approach you all the time and pass by.

More often, though, the author’s words hold us and remind us of the ephemeral nature of our own identities and relationships. We realize that the path we walk through life is along a cliff of oblivion, and that if we don’t feel vertigo every minute it is only because we refuse to look:

It is only our own helpless lack of synchronicity, the inertia of our senses, the illusory power of memory and habit, that shields us from facing the unknown when we open our eyes in the morning, washed up on the shore of yet another alien day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ending of Silence in October is unresolved. We have started with a woman standing over a bed, suitcase at her side, ready to leave. Two hundred and eighty pages later, we know only what her credit card statements tell us—that she has traveled from Denmark through France down to Portugal, staying in hotels.

Instead of moving forward, the story has spiralled out from a starting point in time and space, bringing in ever more information about the narrator’s experiences. We have been taking steps backward from the painting, until we can see the entire canvas.

Silence in October is kind of like chamber music, a melancholy book for a dark fall evening. Serious existential art, like Camus. Very European—it’s hard to imagine an American writing such a book today—or maybe ever

#11: Parrot and Olivier, by Peter Carey

Europeans in the 1820s and 1830s saw America as the hope of the future. The great democratic experiment had managed to survive early scuffles with the great powers and looked to be gaining momentum. We had entered our adolescence as a nation, and so reading about that earlier America is like looking at the teenage image of someone you only got to know in middle age. At first you see no resemblance—the youthful face is blade-thin, the hair thick and shiny. But then you notice the angle of the nose, the distance between the eyes, and the identity begins to emerge.

In the Age of Jackson, American democracy was fluid and effortless. There were no entrenched aristocracies or theocracies. If you needed land, you could move west a few hundred miles and find some for the taking. As long as your ancestors came from a select short list of approved countries, you bowed to no-one, and no-one bowed to you.

America in 2012 still sees itself as a classless society. We believe that anyone can become rich if they’ve got the brains and the determination. This is why millions of people working 50-hour weeks for $10 an hour rally around a political party that refuses to tax the rich—couldn’t that be them with just a little luck and effort? And it’s why teachers are held in such low esteem—if kids don’t learn it isn’t because of where they live or who their parents are. Because this is America and everybody starts even. So it must be the system—those teachers.

Parrot and Olivier is the story of two Europeans—an Englishman and a Frenchman—who come to American in 1830. Parrot, the Englishman, has to his credit no family and no money, and just a modest amount of talent. Fate has carried him from England to Australia and then to France. His real name is John Larrit, but he is called Parrot in recognition of his mimetic abilities—he can draw pretty well and can reproduce the vocal mannerisms of others. He is a copier rather than a true artist. Shrewd, ironic, elliptical and precocious, Parrot is an elusive figure who tends to blend into situations. When others look at Parrot, they don’t really see him—they see his status (or lack thereof) or they see an instrument to do their bidding, because Parrot lives by making himself useful.

Olivier is Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, the only child of two French nobles who have managed—just barely—to survive the French Revolution. We first see Olivier as a high-strung sickly 10-year-old trying to make sense of the mayhem around him. He is a weak, rather pathetic creature given to puking and nosebleeds. But there is determination and imperiousness in him, as well. Olivier adapts the high drama and self-importance of his parents’ circumstances to his own cosseted little world:

Then Odile arrived carrying a large rose-tinted Ch’ien-lung goldfish bowl. This contained my leeches. She set it on an English giltwood stand and removed the muslin cloth from around its neck. These vieilles amies had always been in her charge and she was constantly ready, at whatever hour her bell rang, to scoop out the starving parasites…

Olivier, the book’s jacket copy tells us, is “an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.” Not being well acquainted with that figure, I perused his wikipedia entry and decided that the similarities were relatively superficial. Their circumstances are obviously very similar, but I would be rather surprised to discover that de Tocqueville was nearly so pompous and fantastical as Olivier.

The book consists of alternating first-person chapters from Parrot and Olivier. We wonder, at first, how they will find each other. It happens after they have both grown up. Olivier’s mother, worried that her son might be becoming a conspicuous target for political intrigue, arranges to get him out of harm’s way by having him shanghaied to America. The pretext for this removal is that he is to compile a report on prison conditions in America (as per de Tocqueville). Parrot is sent along as servant and spy—to protect the incautious nobleman but also to report back on on his doings.


Once his characters reach America, Carey keeps several balls in the air. One is the evolving relationship between Parrot and Olivier. After some early spats, they come to appreciate and assist each other. Each has a view of the other that adds perspective and depth to our understanding. Each see the other’s flaws, vanities, etc., but sometimes the observer underestimates the observed, as when Parrot thinks Olivier is failing to woo a certain American heiress when in fact Olivier (who is after all a Frenchman) has matters well in hand.

A second ball is the appraisal of America performed by Olivier. This is where a better appreciation of de Tocqueville would probably have served me well. Olivier admires America and recognizes that its experiment in democracy will eventually spread back across the ocean.

A third ball would be Parrot’s American transformation. Parrot becomes an entrepreneur, helping to publish a book of lavish illustrations of American birds. The reference, of course, is to John James Audubon—another Frenchman who made a name for himself in early nineteenth century America. Except that here the artist is not French and in fact bears no resemblance to Audubon.

Parrot’s talents are a better fit for America than they were for Europe—he’s a swan in New York when he was just an ugly duckling in Paris. He does have a talent after all—for business. All his pecularities and shortcomings have become assets.

I had read two previous Peter Carey novels—Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector. I think of him as a highly entertaining and very original writer. Parrot and Olivier is all that and much more—a book full of riddles, crosscurrents and obscure parallels. That’s what two Man Booker prizes will do for an author—up the ante. It is a book that should probably be read twice. It might not be unfair to say that it is a rather strenuous book that is perhaps a bit overwritten.

Parrot and Olivier is also a very late flower of what Henry James called the “international novel”: the collision of old world sophistication and corruption with new world energy and artlessness. Except that in the 21st century it is no longer possible to present this theme without considerable irony, where innocence corrupts and sophistication is naïveté. In this respect, Parrot and Olivier reminds me in places of another unlikely late specimen of the international novel: Lolita. Humbert Humbert and Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont are alike in being simultaneously enchanted and appalled by American vitality and vulgarity. Both contemplate marriage. Both are humorously high handed. But Humbert has a kind of moral disease in him. He and his teenage nymphet are infecting each other even as they seduce each other. There is tragedy and monstrousness amid the sparkle of Lolita. That’s what makes it a great book. Parrot and Olivier is a fine book as well, but it’s no Lolita.