in the last four days, here are my tallies: 48 beers (still working on the last 6 as I write this), 75 cigarettes, 16 cups of coffee, 20 hours of sleep, 4 hours of basketball practice, six pay-per-view Ultimate Fighting Championship fights (2 hours sitting on a friend’s couch), 4 meals taken at the local greasy spoon, 3 books read 1 book working on reading.
There is pride in gluttony, but not in the way you might think.
The four books lie on an artistic continuum from regrettable to excellent, and the qualitative content mirrors the amount each cost - $4 (Larry McMurtry’s Boone’s Lick) $7 (David Guterson’s East of the Mountains) $25 (Griel Marcus’s The Shape of Things to Come) $25 (Richard Powers’s Echo Makers). McMurtry is an old Texas scribe with a Stegner fellowship under his belt and a few books that made it into motion pictures. This particular books feels mailed in, though that may have something to do with its author’s advancing age and inability to depart from formulas that preceded the historical reimagining of the American West.
Guterson’s “Snow Falling On Cedars” also made it into film – I read it fervently as a sophomore or junior in high school and allow it to pave my imagination’s notion of the Northwest region’s acquiescence to WWII and interment camps – and “East of the Mountains” is not completely devoid of charm.
This is my first foray into a Marcus book, and the play of surfaces he conjures about American prophecy holds me steadier than I might have expected. Reading him makes me want to reread Gatsby Pequod and Young Goodman Brown, helps me recall the old punk rock shows in the basement of the old man’s association’s headquarters (American Legion? Knights of Columbus?) in my hometown, and allows me to relive the particularly salient moments where I identified – or staunchly refused to identify – with things deemed representatively American.
Powers is a heavyweight about whose work I have commented before – he lays legitimate claim to rightful inheritance of those Big White Males Who Wrote Big Novels And Lie In Waiting for Rightful Heart Stoppage. Of Powers I am a begrudging fan, albeit one who has not quite succumbed to unqualified fandom. He takes the biggest of the big topics on with uncanny virtuoso skill, more directly (read: more accessibly) than a Vollman or a Ben Marcus and deserves kudos all around. I appreciate the craft and the attentive, almost compulsive interest in creating formal resonance, but I am not as moved/engaged/captivated by his work as I imagine his most enthusiastic reviewers suggest I should be. I should say that this judgment does not include response to the current work under question. More on that later.
Boone’s Lick is a mediocre book at best, but it reads reasonably well if you can stomach tepid historical fiction about the Great American Frontier. I read it straight through with a six pack of Bud and four smoke breaks. Gunplay and a search for familial solidarity figure strongly, and the teenage narrator’s innocence and wide-eyed apprehension of the American landscape’s glory touch a nerve that, having been activated, prevents me from regretting the reading experience. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s not amped about long-standing narrative story-telling, but . . . .
Guterson weaves a conventional tale that tries too hard to establish its unconventionality: 73 year old doctor protagonist has cancer (is cancer the new badge of authorial authenticity?) and plans out suicide before succumbing to chance events (car accident, bird hunting expedition that leads him too far astray, Greyhound encounter with sick illegal alien, etc.) that stretch narrative plausibility and the reader’s patience at the same stroke. Not to say there aren’t a few nicely sketched parcels – being partial to Bildungsromans involving hard-working, slightly naïve boys who grow up on a farm and fall for the fetching outsider who’s new to the country, I worked through most of it in a morning hangover with coffee and cigarettes as abetting agents. The prose, even, had its attractive points, but I’m a sucker, and I occupy a societal position that accedes to long periods of reading without particularly trenchant purposes, so do with it what you will.
I write this now a day later, New Year’s Eve, and allow that passage of time (and the 200 pages of Powers I’ve read today) to help explain retraction of the earlier suggestion that Powers is all brain and no heart. “The Echo Maker” is a nominee for the National Book Award, and though I have little to gauge the relevance of such accolade-thrusting, I am not surprised by it after finishing the book. I’m not much of a reviewer, but I can call on the tools of the trade here without conscientious objection: fully realized characters, prose that reads impeccably line-by-line, an extremely satisfying exploration of the idea of the self – its porosity, its impossible-to-limn realness, its back and forth cross-sectioned vulnerability, and so on (again: more on this later), and a narrative that draws the reader in and holds her suffocatingly close. There was a late surprise turn in the plot that unfolded without the strenuousness one usually ascribes to late surprise turns; it also had the edifying effect of clarifying some of the main themes I found in the novel.
It feels like I’m cheating when I say that the main theme is the nature of the self, so I’ll compromise a bit and say that the main theme is exploring the different narrative modes we employ when thinking about the nature of the self, both in the abstract (what is a human?) and in the immediate concrete (who the fuck I am and how the fuck do I relate to the smiling little lad in that picture?). Powers has a particular affinity with structural overlap between macroplot occurrences and internal character conflict – the big picture of what happens “echoes with” (sometimes in consonance, sometimes in dissonance) minor realizations that characters have about themselves and the world in which they live.
