"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer

Oh dear Lord, this book pissed me off so much. Forgive me for going on at length, but sometimes it has to be done, for spiritual reasons, I suppose. Good for the soul!

I’ll start by pointing out one nice thing. One of the nice things about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has pictures, so there’s less of it to get through. However, the pictures themselves add nothing. Maybe it’s supposed to be “innovative,” but playing with text and pictures is nothing new – hell, Lawrence Sterne did it in Tristram Shandy and that was back when the printer was a man in a wig hunched over a wooden press. The thing is, Sterne was funny. 250 years later and we’ve regressed. Most of the photos are the equivalent of the clip art in a Powerpoint presentation - somebody doesn’t have enough to say about the future of, say, travel agencies, so they stick a cartoon of a smiling plane up on the slide. Safran Foer’s work is the same; the kid talks about a cat, there’s a photo of a cat. There’s a mention of the Staten Island ferry crash, so of course there’s a shot of a CNN report showing the busted-up ferry. And so on. Most of it’s dull, although I’m saving discussion of the money shot, so to say, for the end.

The text, what’s legible, isn’t that much better. Safran Foer can’t resist a “deep” moment, and it starts to become funny pretty quickly – who’s going to cry next, or come up with a cutesy Rube Goldberg contraption that reflects the Nature of Love, or throw out a trite reflection on Death, or write something, hence demonstrating within the text the limits of the writer’s form, or – well, it goes on. None of the characters are presented as anything other than appealing in a stock sort of way, despite the fact that they are all collections of tics and oddities. As an example, there’s a subplot that takes place in WWII Dresden, of all places, and the German family involved is sheltering a Jewish artist who makes pithy comments about the state of the world. Presumably if they hadn't been sheltering a Jew, or sheltered one of those pushy Jews instead, the reader would think that they were Bad Germans and deserved to have their lungs set aflame. No, I’m being going at this from the wrong direction – it’s much more likely that Safran Foer is constitutionally incapable of writing a character who doesn’t speak in the language of a Hallmark card. Some of the conceits would be cute or charming if they were spaced out into individual books, and I like a good love story, but thrown all together it’s like – to quote an Amazon reviewer with a better grasp of metaphor than Safran Foer – “reading a book in the middle of a swarm of bees.”

Back to the pictures: the book ends with a series of pictures of a man falling out of one of the WTC buildings. I know that this is the classic cry of the prude, but there’s really not much that will positively stop me from finishing a book. I may get bored, but content-wise I can deal with almost anything if it holds my interest. That said, I couldn’t get through the flipbook at the end. It was just too disgusting. I read the last page of text with my head turned to the left and then slammed the book shut because I knew what was coming. I mean, that’s a real person who died in a horrible way and here comes Jonathan Safran Foer to Marley and Me all over his splattered remains by putting him in a goddamn flipbook like something out of a Cracker Jack box. Perhaps I am a softheaded moralist, but I think rather that this reaction reflects some deep inner fear of mine, that one day I will die in a terrifying and humiliating way and then my remains will be immortalized in a mash-up of The Tin Drum and Love Actually.

"Erewhon," Samuel Butler

I attempted to get through Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh for class, and failed miserably; however, I remembered that Butler had written Erewhon, which was prominently featured in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places (a wonderful book and everyone should own a copy), and decided to read that instead. Our hero (a sheep herder, as Butler was once) decides to go exploring in the wilds of colony ----, and finds himself in the mysterious land of Erewhon, where illness is punished by death, and babies are really spirits who have emerged from a nebulous pre-existence. The centerpiece, I suppose, are the chapters on the evolution of machines which were written as a sort-of response to Darwin. I have very little understanding of the 19th century debates on evolution so I am no informed judge; I have to say that were I alive then, I would be swayed to Butler's side, merely because his style is so compelling.

My edition was printed in 1911 and has a list of ads at the back for other books the 1911 reader might want to purchase, including Racial Decay: A Compilation of Evidence from World Sources, in which "The literature of Neo-Mathusianism and the sale of abortifacient drugs and preventive appliances are severely handled by [the author]," The Nursery of Toryism: Reminiscences of Eton under Hornby ("a picture of idleness, lack of organization, and waste of any intellectual energy that showed itself"), and my personal favorite, A Holiday With A Hegelian.

The quick and dirty biography of Samuel Butler.

"The American Way of Death Revisited," Jessica Mitford

I wasn't feeling particularly morbid when I picked this classic up, but I was ready to be rocked by a total takedown of the Undertaker!* And it just didn't happen for me. Part of me enjoyed the prose, and part of me was outraged at the amount of money that the undertakers, cemetery owners, florists, and so on were able to gouge out of grieving families. But a little voice whispered in my ear: But what if you want a really tricked-out coffin? I know it's culturally relativistic and bullshit of me, but all cultures do have their own funeral traditions and we should honor them all, and not get mad at undertakers for... well, being undertakers. It's not their fault they want respect, we all want love and affection, even if we spend our time writing scholarly articles for "Casket Monthly."

Maybe if I was at risk of being embalmed and put on view myself, I'd care more, but as far as I can tell I'm in line to be dumped in the ground ASAP in accordance with religious tradition. Personally I'd like to end up like Jeremy Bentham, but maybe that's a bit much to ask.

* Does anybody remember what the name of that guy was that hung out with the Undertaker, and had the spoooooooooky voice? A question that haunts me to this day.

"The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen

I have a confession to make. I have been lying to others about how crap The Corrections is. I was mainly going off the strength of this review, which quotes from Dune so you know it’s good (I mean that seriously, what’s better than Dune?) I’d never actually read the book – well, I had done the classic bookstore flip-through, but I’d never gone through and absorbed every word, beginning to end. And here I was using the book as an example of literary failure. I wanted to make things right. So I sat down and read the whole thing. And?

Dolan is right when he says that Franzen is a crap writer of metaphors. The “sinus” metaphor really does go on for pages, and then Franzen has the gall to reuse it later on. Some of it the writing was so bad that I started to think that it must be a put-on, that Franzen must be sitting somewhere laughing, or maybe emitting a small strangled sound while his lips twist in an approximation of a smile, over what he was allowed to get away with and win a National Book Award. A description of Manhattan executives as “supergentry” is barely technically correct, but what the “super” is doing there is anybody’s guess. And Franzen describes a Midwestern wind as like “Mexican violence.” Stormy like a burrito fart? Come on.

As for the charge of misogyny? I’m not sure if Franzen’s misogynist – not because he’s particularly kind to his women characters, but because all the male characters are loathsome as well. That said, there are an awful lot of scenes where a woman jumps through hoops to get a man interested in her; even the lesbian scenes have the femme partner degrading herself, while her girlfriend gets a kick out of turning her aside. Generally only the worst sort of women (two-timing golddiggers, slutty students who for some reason are obsessed with their distant professors) actually get to the point of consummation. Yeah, actually maybe he is misogynist.

There’s also a talking shit. Dolan doesn’t bother to mention the talking shit, but it’s not as much fun as Mr. Hankey.

The verdict? The Corrections isn’t terrible. The plot hangs together, and I was generally able to make out what was happening (although, come to think of it, Wizard’s Daughter was slightly better at conveying the passage of time). It’s a moving read, in parts. Not many parts, but in parts. And despite it reading like a fictionalization of David Brooks, it’s less egregious than, off the top of my head… Jed Mercurio’s Bodies. I wouldn’t have read it for pleasure, though, and the fact that I got all the way through it should stand as a lesson that lying doesn’t pay.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley," Patricia Highsmith

Who doesn't like books about closety psychopaths who kill their friends, then assume their identities? This was a good read with wonderfully clean prose (I'm thinking in comparative terms to what I'm going to post on next). Highsmith is exceptionally skilled at making the reader sympathize with a character whose greatest attachment is to items and to a certain ideal of life. She also makes misogyny fun! (again, compater to what I'm going to post on next). There are lots of sequels to Talented Mr. Ripley, which means that I can sink my time into seeing how many people Ripley can get away with killing, and this time without having to imagine Matt Damon involved (unless they made a second Mr. Ripley movie and I just didn't know about it). Ah, bliss.