Jack London- The Call of the Wild, White Fang & Other Stories

The Call of the Wild, White Fang & Other Stories

Oxford World's Classics

Jack London

1998 (Collected)

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” 

The inebriated autobiography of John Barleycorn (1913) was an... interesting way to introduce myself to the work of perhaps the strongest name in American literature. Its increasingly bleak and seemingly honest nature had the effect of humanizing and quantifying the writing style and moral basis of Jack London, whose large body of work and immense reputation had previously seemed slightly off-putting without a good jumping-in point. With the ice broken, the next step to properly exploring London's work was quite clearly to read the subject of this review; a widely-found collection of by-far his two most famous works and a few short stories.

Jack London

To quickly review the short stories by essentially not reviewing them; I unfortunately didn't pay too much attention to them, and their proximity to the two classics put them into further obscurity. They undoubtedly make the book seem better value to those buying it, but I honestly feel that the effects of the collection's headliners made them seem so inconsequential that they would have been better served elsewhere in another collection.With that said, I say all of this in hindsight, as prior to diving in I really didn't know if I was going to enjoy any of this. It took the efforts of the first key work in this collection, The Call of the Wild (1903) to fully draw me in to the true powers of Jack London's fictional portrayals of the wild and the wolf.

I have to admit I was cynical about the maximum potential of a supposedly classic novella written with a dog (or a wolf if you prefer) as the central character, but I think that cynicism came from modern experiences with popular culture, specifically the unbearably cliched over-personification of animals as funny-looking humans (all of which whom are themselves unbearable racial or regional stereotypes). I should've assumed so beforehand, but London's style is far more Paul Auster's Timbuktu (1999) than your average Dreamworks borefest.

First edition cover

At only half the size of its more famous companion piece, The Call of the Wild is a fairly straightforward, truncated coming-of-age tale, where the immensely strong and powerful dog Buck survives a bucket-load of hardship and mistreatment to eventually find his true calling as a wolf in his ancestral forest surroundings. It's a simple and almost believable plot that requires a careful balance of typical narrative fiction tricks and techniques combined with enough authorial restraint to create the reader's suspense of disbelief. Personally I found Buck to be a little too strong, independent and basically perfect to fully immerse myself in his story, since it felt to a certain extent like a wish fulfillment fantasy, if not only for the reader but for London himself, who seems to marvel in the evocative power of nature.

In that sense I could see why it might not be considered by some to be a true American classic in the same respect that much more complicated novels by the likes of Hemingway are, but I do believe that stylistically it's absolutely top-notch work. London's ability to take a character with essentially no inner monologue besides that of instinct and then make him a figure that I cared about was no doubt entirely due to his select prose, resembling a high-class folktale of classic Americana ilk, like a Washington Irving story.

Though Call of the Wild was very good, I found White Fang (1906) to be exceptional, simply because it took the aspects I most enjoyed about Wild and gave them twice the space to fully form. Though the two are generally distinguished through their key plot points of returning to and then from nature, the emotional resonance of them are the same in that the antagonists are essentially finding their true selves. Most crucially, the increased time London spends on depicting the youth and development of White Fang compared to Buck is mostly spent on emphasizing the harsh cruelty of life, both in the wild and the world of man.

As a result, White Fang is a much harsher tale, surprisingly so I found. White Fang himself is warped into a hateful, unloved creature, thanks to a series of realistically-cruel humans and rival dogs, making his eventual redemption that much more rewarding for the reader than that of the much stronger Buck. Towards the end of the novel a couple of the set pieces are perhaps a little too cliched in a Hollywood sense, but I think without some sort of feel-good factor the earlier events of the story would've been unpleasantly pointless.

While neither of these iconic works has enough scope in total to really be compared to far more complicated twentieth-century US classics, London's pure writing talent evidently ranks alongside the very best, as his powerful, clear and evocative descriptions of an extremely difficult subject to realistically portray make White Fang a genuine classic, with The Call of the Wild at least a classic novella. While I don't expect to find anything else by London that's as good, my respect for his writing ability has grown exponentially and it won't be long until I pick up more of his books.

Jim Thompson- The Getaway

The Getaway

Orion Crime Masterworks

Jim Thompson

1958

“He could be breaking apart inside and you'd never know it from the way he acted. He'd be just as pleasant and polite as if he didn't have a care in the world. You had to be careful with someone like that. You could never know what he was thinking.”

I seemed to be on an unfortunate run of feeling disappointed with supposed classics recently, so I hoped to buck that trend by picking off the shelf what appeared to be an easy option. Orion Publishing's Crime Masterworks series had so far introduced me to the sublime noir classic Double Indemnity by James M. Cain and Georges Simenon's very interesting (though not as good) The Blue Room, so I felt confident of finding something more engaging than the somewhat impenetrable international fiction of someone like Yvgeny Zamayatin. I find myself increasingly attached to the whole notion of crime fiction lately, and it's easy to recognise the similarities in that genre and that of Orion's other genre-collecting series, Sci-Fi Masterworks.

Jim Thompson

Both genres offer a universally-recognised set of story-structures that, while very malleable (especially in the hands of a genre-transcending master like Kurt Vonnegut), remain recognisable thanks to a hundred years of almost-unavoidable twentieth century literature and film, and so in theory half the work of establishing a recognisable narrative complete with relevant themes has already been done; a benefit to the author and the reader. With both genres though, the ease of access for both reader and writer naturally leads to a large number of unimaginative, poorly-written, all-in-all substandard attempts from unfortunately less-talented authors. I had hoped that the Masterworks series was also a short-cut to avoid wasting my time on those in general.

I'd been looking forward to reading something by Jim Thompson for a while now, having seen his name crop up plenty of times as a prominent writer of classic twentieth-century crime fiction. The Getaway is seemingly his most famous novel (though The Grifters is another title I see crop up often), perhaps due to Sam Peckinpah's 1972 film adaptation starring Steve McQueen. It was the obvious place to start, with the help of Orion. The break-neck plot seemed right up my alley; charismatic hardened criminal mastermind Doc McCoy and his devoted wife Carol stake their lives on a bank-job with some dicey allies, and wind-up in a gritty race for the safety of the border with the law and the underworld on their trail. Despite the usual double-crossing twists and turns, it's a fairly simple, cinematic action plot starring pulp-influenced over-the-top genre stereotypes. In short, something I've seen and read maybe too many times already, leaving it to live or die on the strength of the prose. 

This is where it all fell apart. A streamlined action-packed plot comprised of familiar stylish elements can only take a writer so far dependent on their ability to construct this world through interesting and consistent writing, neither of which are attributes I ascribe to Jim Thompson. That Thompson's goals in terms of style and impact are well-established is at least admirable, but from the very first pages of The Getaway I was immediately put off through what I perceived to be Thompson's amateurish style. The Getaway is written in the third person, giving Thompson the potential advantage of being able to describe his characters without the inherent bias of a narrating personality, but from the very beginning his establishment of characters and setting massively jarred.

My biggest stylistic hate came from Thompson's repeated habit of literally telling the reader directly what his characters are thinking, in the form of italicized quotes just lacking quotation marks, over and over again. It's a lazy technique that tries to claim the best of both worlds, but failed for me each time since every thought the characters have are just as cliched and superficial as their dialogue, leaving the marked effect of exposing them all as completely two-dimensional. I'm not expecting some sort of extended Dickensian character analysis, just a modicum of depth. In comparison to a classic crime noir character like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Doc McCoy is a hollow, uninteresting bore who's superficial coolness is made an unintentional mockery of through its very construction. Harsh criticism, perhaps, and I'm sure Thompson's work isn't any worse than your average run-of-the-mill thriller writer, but I expected far more from a supposed crime classic from the same publishing series as James M. Cain's Double Indemnity.

Whether I'd recommend it to anyone is an interesting question (well, to me anyway), because it really depends on what the reader expects and what they're willing to put up with. I absolutely do not recommend it to a reader looking for a classic crime noir on the literary level of the Hammett, Cain, or Raymond Chandler and the like, because it's bound to end in disappointment. For a reader who enjoys the comfort of quick, cliched thrillers that are easy to get through, then this might be a great option. Oh, and since we're at the end of the review, it's only appropriate to mention the end of the book; a final chapter that weirdly morphs in style to an ethereal, hallucinogenic-like dream-state that's not too badly written in comparison, actually, though I've no idea what he was trying to achieve with it.

Missing Review Catch-Up III- International Edition

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The Dragon and Other Stories (1913-1937)
Yevgeny Zamyatin

Penguin Modern Classics

After Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita failed to melt the solid wall of ice standing between myself and the great unexplored mass of classic Russian literature, I wasn't to be put off so quickly. Rather than run towards the possible safety of recommended heavyweights like Dostoyevsky and friends, I rebounded in the only way I know how- something completely random, that in this case just happens to also be pretty obscure. The Dragon and Other Stories stood out with its odd cover, and of course Penguin Modern Classics status. Everything I learned about Zamyatin (not much- Russian dissident who wrote a letter to Stalin so he could leave Russia) came from a quick scour of the internet, so I went in to the book mostly ignorant. Sometimes a random book read at a random time can be a game-changer.

But not this time. Again I totally failed to connect with a piece of Russian literature, to the point where it'd be stupid to even try to write a proper review, hence this short one appearing here just to sooth my obsessive compulsiveness. Zamyatin's various short (and less short) stories collected in this posthumous volume describe with authority seemingly-meaningful tales that drift between the harsh realities of Russia's past and then-present and some more fantastical parables that take on dark fairy-tale like scenarios. I think since my knowledge of Russian history is confined to... um, no, can't think of anything... nothing, then, I was probably the wrong person to appreciate the layered allegories that I'm sure permeate Zamyatin's dense stories.

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Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2005)
Jay Rubin

Vintage

This book, on the other hand, I was very tempted to write a full-length (by my standards, anyway) review for, only to decide at the last moment that its content and topic might just be too obscure to be interesting . Jay Rubin is a very familiar name for English language-reading Murakami fans, for being perhaps the most prominent of all yet to translate the author into our language (as well as translating Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon collection), and so it seemed only natural for Rubin to write a book about his life and works. Part biography, part critical interpretation, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words looks at the inspiration, creative process and public reaction to every Murakami novel, as well as his most important short stories.

I'd straight away recommend this to any serious Murakami fan looking to put his work into a greater context. The biographical information is interesting, though not particularly in depth- personally I prefer this to be the case, as Murakami's mystique works better without the obvious-in-hindsight revelations that he's actually a fairly normal man. As someone who pays little-to-no attention to the contemporary Western literary scene, let alone the Japanese one, it was also interesting to read more information about Japanese literary history, especially Murakami's influences and contemporary critics.

The one major criticism I found was that the book attempts to cover too much ground in too little space, particularly in regards to Rubin's interpretation of Murakami's fiction. I often found myself disagreeing with Rubin's ideas, but that made them no less interesting, and so the problem was that Murakami's longer works really need more space to accurately discuss. Rubin's reluctance to persist with spoilers also damaged his analysis for me, especially since I can't imagine there are many people who'd read this without already having devoured Murakami's own bibliography. Other than that, this was an enjoyable and informative take on an author very deserving of further public discussion. 

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The Immoralist (1902)
André Gide

  

Penguin Modern Classics

Man, French literature is just weird. Everything past the nineteenth century seems to have existentialism burnt in to its very core, and each author I read has an unstoppable fixation with looking at the worst parts of human nature in one way or another. Everything's constantly intense, everyone guilty of something, and nothing ever gets resolved neatly. Andre Gide's turn of the century novella The Immoralist was decried for years due to its homoerotic overtones, though reading it over a hundred years later it seems hard to see what the fuss was all about. Instead this novel to me, rather than focusing on the protagonist Michel's growing attraction to men was really all about his generally horrible treatment of his wife, Marceline.

The plot of the novella revolves around Michel recovering from a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis, on his Tunisian honeymoon with Marceline, who has lovingly nursed him back to health and attended to his every whim. Michel responds by re-discovering himself in the arms of young Arab men, and waxing lyrical on the new realizations he understands about life. I couldn't connect with him whatsoever, and thus the story was lost on me. Gide's work is well-written in translation at least, with an extensive vocabulary and poetical nature, but it's contents said little to me. Michel came across as such an unlikable character, with his over-bearing self-realizations clashing with his actual behaviour, that I was the most disappointed I have been by a piece of French literature.

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John Steinbeck- Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men

Penguin

John Steinbeck

1937

“A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.”

To a generation (or two) of millions upon millions of British adolescents, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is the absolute definitive piece of American literature, far ahead of anything else, whether it be grand novels Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby, or the tone of Ernest Hemmingway or Edgar Allen Poe. I honestly have no idea how the general American public view it; if whether it's considered as important as the aforementioned classics or indeed Steinbeck's other, longer works like The Grapes of Wrath, but over on my side of the Atlantic it's a definitive text for a pretty simple reason.

John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men was in my experience the most memorable of every text I was made to study alongside every other student in Britain as part of the mandatory GCSE teaching syllabus for English Literature taught in secondary school. Almost fifteen years later it's still a focal point of the course, and so now my younger sister has to study it. She asked me a few questions about it recently but I hadn't read it in so long that when I coincidentally saw a copy in my favourite used bookstore soon after I had to pick it up and relive it. At just over one hundred pages, I'd forgotten that its brevity makes it the perfect length for the mind of an easily-distracted fifteen-year-old.

All these years on, with the benefit of that much time to explore further some the vast array of classic North American novels available, Of Mice and Men still stands out to me as an amazing novella, both due to the power and emotion of its plot and through its symbolic representation of the major themes of the American novel, condensed into a compelling microcosm. The novella's plot is probably ubiquitously known to the point that spoilers warnings are pointless- in the destitute farmlands of California during the great depression, George Milton and Lenny Small desperately search for work from anywhere they can get it, living in poverty dreaming of owning their own small piece of land one day.

George is small, smart and capable, while Lennie is a giant with the mind of a child, and therefore the target for abuse and misaccusations from the paranoid struggling communities in which they travel. The two of them take a job on a farm in Monterrey County with its own cast of misfits and minorities, and Lenny becomes unwittingly embroiled in the marital problems of the farm owner's volatile son, Curley. Curley's bored and promiscuous wife enchants Lenny, but her failure to understand his fragile state leads to her accidental death by his hand. As Curley rounds up a gang to hunt Lenny to the death, George is left with the final decision as to Lenny's fate.

Compacted into such a short space, I found it to be an incredibly powerful, tense, and compelling novel from start to finish. Stylistically Steinbeck's prose is superbly crafted with just the right balance of minimalism in the dialogue and description in the narration to make it immensely readable (thoguh limited in comparison with other famous texts like Gatsby). The pacing and plot structure is also seemed extremely cinematic to me, thanks to Steinbeck's use of recurring motifs, and the constant foreboding sense of impending doom depicted in Lenny's repeated lack of understanding of his own incredible strength, as he despairingly kills each and every pet George gives him.

Though Lenny is the more memorable character, George is more important in relating the injustice of just about everything that happens in the story, and so his frustration felt as one with mine. At the end of the book, as George makes the fateful decision to end Lenny's pain and suffering once and for all, the culmination of all the bitterness surrounding the twisted morality of the situation left me with no easy answers. I will confess though, I remember when reading the book as an adolescent I found myself angry with George for taking what seemed to me to be a coward's way out- but this time I felt completely on his side. 

I think the answer to that is honestly a rather downbeat one, in the sense that the proceeding years of my life left me with a far more cynical outlook on the world, aided by the thematic conclusions of other American classics. Gatsby is the most obvious one, telling me that the poor will always remain poor, that Gatsby, Lenny and George were screwed before they were even born simply because of their origins. It's a sense of bitterness that's probably not mentally healthy, but can lead to great literary achievement. In the decades to follow, books like Post Office, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Naked Lunch would defy expectations of normal literature, but at their core challenge the concept of the American Dream.

 Steinbeck was far more conventional in structure than the beatniks and the hippies to come, but the combination of such a well-crafted, evocative story and its themes made it as enjoyable to me as they were. My regret is that my own unfamiliarity with Steinbeck's work outside of this novella makes it hard for me to write with more insight on the author's particular fixations. My enjoyment of Of Mice and Men this time has ensured that I'm going to one day rectify that and add another author to my reading list (so, give it about ten years for another Steinbeck review). I also have to finally commend the people or person who picked it to take such an important position in the UK as one of the primary introductions to US lit for millions of school children. And if you yourself were one of those once upon a time and remember not liking it, maybe give it another shot one day with older and (hopefully) wiser eyes.

Paul Auster- Winter Journal

Winter Journal

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2012

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Hand To Mouth - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - The Brooklyn Follies - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.”

After his last piece of fiction, 2010's Sunset Park, Paul Auster suggested (though I can't seem to find the quote) that he might be done with fiction. I don't quite believe that, at least not completely, but for now it has resulted in the author switching his focus primarily to an alternative obsession and writing a thematic sequel to his first notable work. From almost thirty-five years ago that book was The Invention of Solitude, consisting of Auster's personal memoirs relating to the recent unexpected death of his father. I found it to be a powerful, absorbing read. Approaching Winter Journal, though, I was admittedly more apprehensive.

Cool Auster

As Auster recognises in his prose, Winter Journal was 'inspired' (if that isn't an inappropriate term) by the death of his mother, naturally causing another outburst of emotions and memories from an extremely introspective writer. As a die-hard Auster fan I was quite happy to read another memoir, but already it became hard to ignore the fact that he might have already drained his personal anecdotes in previous releases. The aforementioned Solitude took a serious look into the structure of his family and upbringing, The Red Notebook (later released as part of The Art of Hunger) took a scattershot look at notable incidents of coincidence and apparent fate in Auster's life, and Hand To Mouth was a more amusing, honest look at Auster's life as a struggling student and aspiring author.

That leaves the twenty years or so since Hand to Mouth (1997) to cover, and while that seems a long enough time I doubt that the latter, success-filled years of an established author are anywhere near as interesting as his origins. Auster must have realised that, and as a consequence Winter Journal again takes in the whole scope of Auster's life until that point, this time (as the title suggests) looking at it all from the perspective of a much older man observing the changes and declines in his physical well-being. Not really an immediately exciting concept, I know.

Henry Holt & Co. Publishing

The key stylistic choice that essentially defines the novel as a whole (and which I probably should've mentioned by now) is that Auster goes the Slaughterhouse-Five route of chronologically flying all over the place with each paragraph- loosely following his themes to connect each one. As a result of this division each paragraph gains its own sense of relevance and own artistic identity, of a fashion; quickly switching between drama, tragedy or comedy when required. There's also the sense that each segment carries its own sense of poetic integrity, its own evocative notions and balance of ideas and style. Earlier on in the book I found this seemed to make an easy read, such was the variety.

Unfortunately I found it became less and less interesting the further I read. Despite being only 230 pages long in a typically-modern large font, Winter Journal outsays its welcome two thirds of the way through, where the lack of a particular journey and too much of a focus on mundane life events (mundane to me, anyway, obviously not to Auster, but compared to his usual standards of intricate stories quite mundane) made it fairly clear that Winter Journal is ultimately a self-indulgent project. Don't get me wrong,. Auster has clearly achieved enough to justify a personal side-project, and there are some genuinely emotionally resonant sections, but as a whole there's not enough interesting content to keep this up to Auster's usual standard. Considering  that his next book Report from the Interior is a companion piece, I'm worried that the inevitable future review of it will be even less flattering.

Hunter S. Thompson- The Rum Diary

The Rum Diary

Bloomsbury

Hunter S. Thompson

Written from 1960-1961, Published in 1998

Other Hunter S. Thompson Reviews- Hell's Angels - Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - The Great Shark Hunt

“It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.” 

The key detail that most book fans know about The Rum Diary is that it went unpublished for almost forty years, until professional Hunter S. Thompson fan Johnny Depp discovered the manuscript and convinced him to finally publish it. For Thompson's legion of fans this was great news, since though Thompson was a very prolific essay writer, with numerous collections available, his long-form work has always been somewhat thin on the ground; especially considering the longevity and popularity of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The question then became as to whether Rum Diary would actually be any good or not; since its original vanishing act occurred after numerous rejections from publishers- not a good sign- and it wasn't for another five years with the publication of Hell's Angels in Rolling Stone that Thompson's name was really made. With that in mind, I was a little paranoid that Rum Diary would be no better than an early curio.

Thankfully it seems like Johnny Depp knows a good manuscript when he reads it, because I found Rum Diary to be much more entertaining and polished than I expected- to the point where I'm scratching my head as to why it was originally rejected (with my only real theory being that publishers may have felt it to seem derivative of recent counter-cultural classics). Reading it over fifty-years later the tone of the narrative is pure (albeit-early) Hunter S, like his later work, built upon the close foundation of the author's own experiences. Thompson adapts his time spent in San Juan, Puerto Rico, turning himself into the character Paul Kemp; new employee at The Daily News, the only English language newspaper in the territory.

While struggling to adapt and survive in the tense Hispanic atmosphere, Kemp and his fellow outrageous American journalists get drunk and cause trouble throughout, constantly at odds with the locals in the aggressive post-colonial atmosphere. While Kemp struggles to establish himself and stay sane, he finds himself drawn to fellow journalist and drinker Yeamon, and his free-spirited girlfriend Chenault. Together the three of them delve further into the volatile nightlife, leading to dramatic and shocking events that finally drive them off the island. From a thematic viewpoint, the events of The Rum Diary fit perfectly within the range of past and future beatnik literature, to such a strong extent that it surprised me to contrast just how early this book was written compared to more famous and well-regarded examples. Primarily it's easy to compare it to Kerouac's On the Road, at least up to a certain extent when considering the activities that the characters get up to, but knowing Thompson's contempt for Kerouac it's easy to see how the two eventually differ, as The Rum Diary seems to me to have a far heavier focus on the inner moral turmoil of its central character.

It also puts Thompson's position with Charles Bukowski in a new light; Fear and Loathing was published the same year as Post Office, making them both icons of the 70's, but Rum Diary has ten years on that, as an example of the down and out thematic direction that newer authors had taken the examples of Fitzgerald. Thompson was well-known as an admirer of The Great Gatsby, and aspects of the character relationships and plot structure (the climactic revalations of helplessness in the face of the order of things) provide a template for Thompson's novel. The Rum Diary is not as impressive a stand-alone novel as these other examples; the fate of the newspaper is uninteresting, and the non-central characters interchangeable.

In conclusion, it was better late than never for The Rum Diary. Compelling, evocative and thoughtful, it would've been a massive shame had this remained in limbo. There are a number of other Thompson books that went unpublished due to his dissatisfaction with them, and I can only hope that they eventually see the light of day. Without Rum Diary, Thompson's career as a fiction writer is disappointingly thin, so the critical success of it suggests that fans have a lot to look forward to if a events conspire to expand his range of published novels.

Paul Auster- The Brooklyn Follies

The Brooklyn Follies

Faber&Faber

Paul Auster

2005

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Hand To Mouth - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.”

In 2005, Paul Auster was coming off a six-year run consisting of three phenomenal novels. Seemingly determined to shed his reputation as a promising novelist to be recognised as the real deal, Auster did so in  style with three distinct, powerful novels that showcased his range and imagination as a talented postmodernist with a continually improving grasp on realistic human emotion; in 1999's Timbuktu he toyed with readers' emotions through writing from the perspective of homeless dog Mr. Bones. He followed with 2002's The Book of Illusions, a more complex story about the legacy of fictional silent film star genius Hector Mann, and continued with dark novel Oracle Night, refocusing on Auster's primary concerns of the meaning of identity and coincidence. The Brooklyn Follies, released just two years later, was under the pressure of matching-up to the collective twisted penmanship of that period while offering something new.

Auster's new approach, then, was in hindsight the obvious thing to do in order to create a new challenge for a man who, over the last twenty years, had mastered the art of alternative contemporary literature; he went completely back to basics, and wrote a novel without the aid of his once-impressive box of post-modernist tricks. Though Auster was lauded for the intelligence of the timing of his various unexpected techniques, perhaps by this point he simply tired of the pressure of coming up with another ingenious concept The Brooklyn Follies, then, is Auster's response; his most realistic novel yet, focusing on a busy period in the life of his central character Nathan Glass, where the remnants of his fractured family are brought back together following a series of dramatic events.

60-year-old Glass is at a pivotal point in his life, after having narrowly survived a battle with lung cancer and divorced his wife. This 320-page novel tells Glass' story upon his return to his native Brooklyn, where he meets the cast of characters set to change the rest of his life. At first he befriends his estranged nephew Tom and learns of the misfortunes of the separated side of his family, then Tom's charismatic and flamboyant boss Harry, and three three plot together to find a way of alleviating the financial difficulties of every day life. It's from this point that the novel begins to seriously differ from Auster's typical direction; though I was expecting the beginnings of a certain labyrinthine direction and perhaps a tinge of magical realism, in The Brookyln Follies Auster goes against these expectations to swing in the direction of a much more realistic human interest story.

I found it to be an easy, enjoyable read. Auster's central characters are likable and sympathetic, particularly the narrating Glass whose aged introspection and growth in confidence through the novel give it real direction. It's well-plotted and paced, with the shifts in tempo well-timed to prevent any dullness and emphasis the tempestuousness of this period in Glass' life. The central thread is revealed when, out of nowhere, Glass' nine-year--old great niece arrives on his doorstep, determined to stay while observing an apparent vow of silence, and as the protagonist moves to protect her he learns to reconnect and be there for other lost family members. 

Of all of Auster's novels it's relatively feel-good stuff, perhaps from an author at this point tired of the intense mystery and character misery of his earlier work. The catch to making this novel more accessible than most of his other work, though, is that it still has to be compared to it, and in comparison to Auster's best this falls short. The removal of all postmodernism or magical realism may be refreshing for Auster, but removes one of his most potent weapons. I'm not saying that every Auster book requires rampant postmodernism to be worth looking at, but his past novels decisively proved that he is at his best when incorporating certain aspects of the surreal. Moon Palace is the perfect example in a novel that doesn't break any storytelling rules but relies upon hints of surrealism through atmospheric depictions of larger than life, but technically possible situations. The Brooklyn Follies strictly keeps to real-life, and while it was engaging to read at the time, upon completion just didn't leave a particularly large impact. Overall an enjoyable, interesting read, but not up to the top standards of such a talented author.

Charles Bukowski- Hot Water Music

Hot Water Music

Ecco Publishing

Charles Bukowski

1983

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Hollywood - Pulp - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.”

I couldn't help but constantly compare Charles Bukowski's early 80's short story collection Hot Water Music to another collection I read prior, South of No North (both published in similar pulp-like editions by Ecco Press- an imprint of HarperCollins seemingly looking to replicate the original underground press feel of original publishers Black Sparrow Press), to look at how the author continued to refine his unique style of writing over the ten year difference in publication dates. The key overall impression I got from the 1973 collection from an as-then relatively unknown author was a raw, unrefined and barely-controllable anger, wallowing in the mire of a down-and-out alcoholic beatnik lifestyle. Mixing autobiographical works (starring Bukowski's alter-ego of his novels, Henry Chinaski) with some more original story ideas (though we're still talking about Bukowski here, his settings are still very familiar) Hot Water Music was a very easy, enjoyable read. 

The first story is a simply outrageous and incredibly black concept that would surely come across like a punch in the face to anyone experiencing his writing for the first time. You Kissed Lily is a short domestic horror story about a wife violently obsessing over her husbands infidelity from five years ago, until she snaps and shoots him in a fit of rage. Bukowski's minimalistic narration gives the feeling of brutal inevitability, of unsympathetic lowlife culture, but with a tongue-in-cheek undertone punctuated by a finalising punchline that confirms the whole thing as a disguised comedy all along. Later on the story Decline and Fall left a similar feeling of urban horror, in a second-hand story told to a barman about a meeting with voyeuristic couple who make him question his understanding of good and evil relating to hedonism. The masterful balance of violence with apathy; Bukowski's ability to control the tempo of his prose and the attention of his audience, go along with the chronology of his work to suggest that this was critically his best period.

The forth Henry Chinaski novel Ham on Rye is, to me, the best of all Bukowski's novels in offering his most meaningful, most desolate writing, and the form he showed there carries on into this collection released one year later. There may be those who find less enjoyment in Bukowski's most personal, self analytical and critical work because it is noticeably bleaker than his earlier, almost jaunty novels like Post Office and Factotum, but the fact remains to me that the amusing character of Chinaski who rolled through those novels with a harem of strange women and angry bosses always had a much darker side to his nature. To that end Bukowski includes within Hot Water Music the story The Death of the Father, which I read as an epilogue to Ham on Rye. The title gives the topic away with that one, as Chinaski attends his father's funeral without remorse, then takes the old man's last girlfriend afterwards, for good measure.

Most of the other stories have momentary plots that wouldn't sound interesting here, but rely on Bukowski's poetic mastery of one-liners and love of the down and outs. Some of them, like Home Run, have an unpleasantness to them. Bukowski made it very clear many times about his disdain for the human race, and that hatred flows from the page through the acts of morally repugnant characters in desperate situations. This was my favourite of all the Bukowski collections (I've so far read, only three left by my count), fiction or non, displaying Bukowski at his creative peak.

Norman Mailer- The Armies of the Night

Armies of the Night- History as a Novel/The Novel as History

Penguin

Norman Mailer

1968

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."

My book-buying approach is very scattershot; though I do have a system; the vast majority of them are randomly bought from usually the same bookshop (Oxfam Bookshop Hereford, I salute you)  and chosen through a combination of randomness and snobbery. When I find an author I really like, I hold off on running through their bibliography until I've completely finished the works of other authors (which almost never happens). I usually only use Amazon when there's something new (*cough* Murakami *cough*) that I really want or when I'm down to the nitty gritty of the last few pieces of a particular author and hoping they'll turn up second hand is a bit naive (though it does happen more often than you'd expect). The real big downside of picking books via author 99% of the time, particularly second-hand, is that I end up with a selection of books of which I know very little about. 

This is really a long-winded way of explaining how I came across Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, why I bought it, and how its subject matter and style caught me unprepared, yet somehow managed to fit a pretty interesting style of important 20th century world literature that I didn't even know I was interested in; the non-fiction novel. The first Norman Mailer novel I read was An American Dream, and it was right up my alley, as, like Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. for example, it took elements of classic hard-boiled pulp fiction and set them in a very cynical low-life modern almost-dystopian America. In contrast, the non-fiction novel, a genre of which Armies helps define, loses the advantages of true fiction but still presents the real world experiences of the author as an almost-unbelievable fantasy. The recognised originator of the genre as we know it was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and, like Capote, it's very easy to see the influence of Mailer's previous fiction directing the style of his prose.

Angry young Norman

Covering the 1967 anti-Vietnam War March upon the Pentagon, Mailer dramatises the events, his own personal experiences, by first writing as an omniscient narrator and making himself a separate but central character in part one of the book, entitled History as a Novel. Here Mailer details the planning and then procession of the march, using lavish, fiction-like prose to introduce his fellow conspirators, media observers, and opposing political figures. The intended effect seemed to me to intentionally portray the proceedings as somewhat fantastical, in the sense of its reliance on eccentric characters as much as pure luck and disorganisation. Mailer portrays himself as particularly ridiculous, self-important and comfortably at home as a ring leader of a circus of hippies and beatniks. To be honest, I found his personification to be rather annoying, as I did the narration, as I struggled to care enough about his sardonic over analysis of almost every mundane detail. As a result, I found large portions of the book a chore to get through.

This might just be my inability to find much (or any) interest in American politics; something that I'd previously found with another landmark non-fiction novel, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson's take on his experiences held a more directly cynical tone, but the overall effect of overall ridicule left the same impression- and, despite my familiar enjoyment of Thompson's acidic observations, I found that book to be boring as well. In the much-shorter part two of the book, subtitled The Novel as History, Mailer drops the act and switches to more direct, analytical prose taking a mostly-serious look at the experiences he fictionalised. I found this to be far more readable, immediately comparable in style and clarity to the work of George Orwell, particularly The Road to Wigan Pier.

In a sense it would be rigbt to admit that I was disappointed by this book, having enjoyed An American Dream so much, but my failed expectations shouldn't be made into criticism. In truth, despite somehow just hammering out a moderate-length review, I'm really not the person to be reviewing Armies of the Night because I think my mind actively rebels against notions of politics. Nevertheless, I'm not going to let this put me off any more Norman Mailer in the future, particularly in the hope that understanding the ideologies of the man more will probably give me a greater enlightenment of what Armies of the Night was really saying. Might not be the near-future, though.

Paul Auster- Hand To Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

Hand to Mouth- A Chronicle of Early Failure

Picador Press

Paul Auster

1997

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.”

One of the more obscure entries in Paul Auster's bibliography (which after ten years I'm finally getting near to finishing), Hand to Mouth is a prequel to his name-making 1982 debut The Invention of Solitude- the collection of introspective personal memoirs surrounding the death of his father. Again taken with the need to chronicle his own life, this short tome covers the period of Auster's experiences from his latter university days up until his first serious attempts at novel writing, and so mostly consists of self-admittedly overzealous failed writer angst, mixed-up with his memories of some very odd people whom influenced him on the way. It's also a very brief read, as Auster purposefully condenses experiences and descriptions of others that others may have dwelled upon into barely 160-pages.

Auster is super cool.

This brevity is the key to Hand to Mouth's final status as an amusing, but unfortunately irrelevant read- even to someone as fascinated by Auster's long-form prose fiction as I. The appeal of the book was obvious; the chance to perhaps further understand the creative process of a literary hero, but such opportunities seemed few and far between. Though Auster describes the extent of his earlier self's desperation, the introspective self-analysis contains more than a hint of embarrassment at the naivety of youth, and lacks enough detail to suggest important life-points. I get the feeling that Auster wanted to recapture the autobiographical spirit of his predecessors (such as Jack London with John Barleycorn), but was probably too much of a normal person to stand out.

As a result, his exploits meander from slightly interesting, such as his travels to France and Ireland, to generic normality, to absurdity- the latter referring to the time he spent serious time and effort trying to create and have published his own baseball-inspired card game. Auster's baseball fascination nearly always results in easily the worse segments from his fiction, and does so again in this autobiography, where it just seems so stupid and pointless it actually seemed to bring him down in my estimation.

As an Auster devotee (as, I imagine, 95% of the people who read this book will be), I found it amusing and mostly likable enough, but disappointing with that. There are certain aspects which relate to the motivations of characters in his book (particularly the sublime Moon Palace), probably more than I noticed, but not enough for it to seem revelatory. If any non-Auster fans come across Hand to Mouth, I'm sure they'd probably appreciate it as a decent, well-constructed light read also, though little more than that. In essence it's a curio, a self-obsessed long essay that Auster likely never intended to make waves but which he probably felt he needed to write.

Ken Kesey- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Penguin Modern Classics

Ken Kesey

1962

“Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn't it?”

Forgive me for becoming too introspective on this, but reviewing an undoubted cultural classic like Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest always seems an awkward proposition- particularly if the reviewer hasn't read it before, nor indeed anything by that author. The problem isn't the need to theoretically try and critically ravage a classic book, because that's not particularly hard at all; you just need to become as obnoxious as possible and target the legions of people who, over time, have built up its acclaim. No, the problem becomes the effect of slight criticism (nitpicking, essentially), and the art of portraying it as, in your opinion, only a four star book rather than five, since it's so, so easy to casually  publicly overrate popular things out of general kindness and the will to succumb to popular opinion. Goodreads is a testament to all of this, a database where legions of casual readers constantly give five stars to contemporary pieces of utter shit, distorting the overall review scores compared to genuine classics that suffer through being more challenging to read and absorb.

Ken Kesey

With that said, I should mention that I gave Cuckoo's Nest four out of five stars on Goodreads, which I know should (if they ever see it) upset a few people I know who consider it to be an undeniable five star classic of American literature; one of the defining novels of the entire nation and up there with books like The Great Gatsby and Slaughterhouse-Five in both quality and influence. In regards to its cultural influence, I can one hudnred percent understand how that's true, despite my relatively short experience with it (I've never seen the even more famous 1975 film adaptation so the story was totally new to me).  I like to view the scope of twentieth century American literature as an incomplete puzzle, where the missing pieces are impossible to define until properly explored, after which it's impossible to view the puzzle without them, and in that respect Cuckoo's Nest is a vitally important piece.

Written within a framework I increasingly respect (through novels like the aforementioned Gatsby, and W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence), where the narrator shares and maybe even relinquishes the role of main character to another messianic figure, Cuckoo's Nest introduces a very memorable and sympathetic cast of mental asylum patients trapped in a repressive, dictatorial facility where the staff use the patients' syndromes as aides to keep them in line. The stoic, silent Chief Bromden narrates the novel as a long-time Native American resident who has fooled his fellow residents and staff into thinking he is a deaf mute, all the while listening and observing their conversations. When McMurphy, a sane convict who successfully argued his way into what he thought would be an easier internment, becomes his new room mate, Bromden witnesses first hand his attempts to lift his new associates from the repressive doom and gloom of their lives- putting McMurphy into direct conflict with the head nurse, the manipulative Mrs. Ratchford.

From this point on, the book becomes about the battle of wills between McMurphy and Ratchford,  essentially representing liberal and conservative viewpoints. McMurphy is an initially reluctant hero, but who grows as a leader through his friendships with his fellow inmates like Bromden, all of whom respond positively to McMurphy's own form of mental health treatment. Kesey's key themes are essentially very, very simple, easy to follow from the very beginning of the novel and equally as easy to sympathise with. The events of the plot are fairly low-key (until closer to the ending, of course), with a strong focus on characterisation. As the narrator, Chief Bromden grows in confidence and self-respect as McMurphy pushes him to do so, and Bromden's understanding of the system in which he lives in become clearer and stronger.

By making Bromden a Native American, Kesey further establishes a tone of injustice in regards to how the 'combine' (referring to the faceless figures in charge) exists as a system to repress those it deems ill-fitting. As a moral thesis, Kesey's writing is easy to understand and agree with, but then in fairness didn't really go very much further than that. He seems to have the ideals of a George Orwell, but limits the scope of his fiction to embellish the effect on individual human lives, which is part of the reason I don't feel this book hits the heights of premier American literature.

Stylistically, the tone is somewhere between Orwell and John Steinbeck, but I felt that Kesey's prose lacked the effortless majesty of those I consider the best. As a result it was fairly easy to read without too much thought, for better and for worse. The constant human interest and strong character development goes further towards that, but, again. is limited. Perhaps I'm being too unfair considering that Kesey and this novel exists as a bridge between the beatnik generation of the 50's and the unmitigated hippies of the 60's- but even considering that I felt Kesey's prose and stylistic standards to be less adventurous than Jack Kerouac, for example. It's still very good, engrossing, and enjoyable, but didn't have the same impact with me as books by authors with similar reputations, like Vonnegut, Pynchon, or of course Fitzgerald. All of this is a long explanation of why I gave Cuckoo's Nest four stars instead of five on a different website, even though I don't give scores here. In actuality, I very much enjoyed it and could see myself going back to read it again in a few years, as well as reading Ken Kesey's other work.

Charles Bukowski- Pulp

Pulp

Virgin Publishing

Charles Bukowski

1994

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Hollywood - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

"It was a hellish hot day and the air conditioner was broken. A fly crawled across the top of my desk. I reached out with the open palm of my hand and sent him out of the game."

Apologies to anyone sick of the constant Bukowski (and Auster) reviews going up on this blog recently, but I'm on a kick to complete their bibliographies and nothing will stop me. Well, plenty of things might stop me, but I hope they don't, okay? My accelerated race through the German-born author's bibliography led to the mild disappointment of his final, thinly-veiled autobiographical piece Hollywood, which itself upon completion left only one final mysterious novel for me to look at; the enigmatic, satirical, frustrated and unresolved Pulp. Before I received my copy through the mail I really had no idea what to expect (I tend to avoid book summations of works by authors I already respect, just to keep things as a surprise), and now, coming out of the novel, I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the strange combination of thoughts it left me with. It's not a good book, but it's a very interesting one.

I don't want to go into too much detail regarding the plot, for reasons that shall hopefully seem apparant, but let me start by saying that Pulp is both completely and undeniably unoriginal, and yet something totally unique. I think I might have to explain that one; the unoriginality is rather more obvious; Pulp is a satirical pastiche of hard-boiled detective fiction that includes all of the obvious stereotypes of the genre, ramped up to a Spinal Tap-like eleven with a notable ferocity. Bukowski's lead private dick is Nick Belane, a run-down no-good scumbag who, as these things go, is unexpectedly called upon by the most fatal of femme fatale's  to investigate a case. Her name is Lady Death, and her existence leads into the more self-referential, metaphysical side to this novel, which we'll get to in a second.

“I was feeling unfulfilled and, frankly, rather crappy about everything. I wasn't going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of us weren't even doing little things.”

As these often go, Belane quickly finds himself picking up a couple of other cases, all of which seem to confusingly entwine with Lady Death. As he investigates, Belane pushes himself further and further into trouble- more trouble than Bukowski himself had expected, and so Belane finds himself having to viciously fight his way out of these desperate situations. Bukowski dedicates the book 'to bad writing', and all reports regarding Bukowski's thoughts on the writing process suggest the corners he found himself putting Belane in were as a result of his own lack of planning. This continues throughout the whole book, and so at no point does the reader get a solid grip on what's actual going on. Bukowski might have eventually sorted these problems out, but inconveniently died before he could, and as a result the plot is very poorly structured. 

Love this cover.

I think that the trouble Bukowski had writing Pulp stems from his ambitious attempts to make it stand out as a notable piece of postmodernism, in trying to represent on the page the thoughts of an author struggling with mortality. Belane regularly struggles for his life in brutal fights with lowlife thugs, as well as also witnessing the amazing immortality of the beings he finds himself tangled up with, since Belane quickly discovers that some of the people he's been investigating are really immortal aliens from outer space. It's a plot development that feels very in debt to Kurt Vonnegut, and Bukowski's prose has the same unwavering straight-faced style, where the narrator swings from straight forward descriptions of surreal concepts to brief introspective comments that suggest he might just be insane. Another author who I couldn't help thinking of is the late great Douglas Adams, and his two Dirk Gently detective novels, since there's a certain tone of dry humour about the supernatural intrusion into the detective genre that quickly reminded me of the Dirk Gently series. 

Upon finishing the last of Bukowski's novels, and the first to be truly fiction, I was mostly left with 'what if?' questions, about just what the author might have done in his career had he written more pure fiction. It's a moot point at the end of the day, but though I wouldn't undo any of the Henry Chinaski novels (well, maybe Hollywood if I absolutely had to) if I could, I think the evidence of Pulp suggests he would've come up with some very imaginative stuff. Unfortunately for Pulp itself, it's too handicapped by the circumstances of its writing and publication to be a really good novel by itself, but I did find it to be mostly fun from start to finish thanks to Bukowski's unwilting wit, and its explosive deconstruction of the detective fiction genre. It's a really strange way for Bukowski to bow out, but it somehow kind of fits.