a sense of joy and then a panic

One of the little joys in my life is staying at other people's houses and reading their books.  For some reason it comes much more easily than reading books I bought for myself - it's like they're just there, free, weightless, "read me or don't read me, I don't care."  It's how I read The Quiet American and The Bell-Jar, and now it's how I've read Revolutionary Road (in the span of three nights) by Richard Yates.

For me, two things stuck out: how much the 1950s reminded me of Lincoln, Nebraska (and 1950s New York is apparently what girls who go to Barnard still seek), and how great Richard Yates is at structuring plot and character development, and how extremely readable he is without sacrificing depth.  Everything just flowed with the sense of inevitability (and dread), from tense but mundane beginning to horrific end (see Stewart O'Nan's assessment).  I hate to sound so hallmarky, but it is pretty inspirational from a writing standpoint.

I think if I were to pick a song for this book, it would be one that has no sense of the 1950s at all:



* A couple chapters in the main character accuses his wife of acting out something from Madame Bovary, another book that was condemned by many of my AP Lit classmates as having no sympathetic character (as I recall they were happy when Emma finally died, in a "good, bitch is dead" sort of way).

If I could make music videos I would make one for this movie to the tune of "They're Coming To Take Me Away," Neuroticfish cover.

I think my favorite exchange (other than "murders and executions") was:

Evelyn Williams: You hate that job anyway. I don't see why you just don't quit.
Patrick Bateman: Because I want to fit in.

It was a real "YESS" moment for me.  I have friends/acquaintances for whom this would probably strike too close to home.

It's a tricky movie, though, because you know there are people out there who are like "yay Wall Street" after seeing this movie.  I mean the number of people who don't "get" what I see as the point of this scene, for example, is huge.  Patrick Bateman's world is complete artifice, shallow and insincere and color-by-numbers, where merit is determined by business card fonts and the most time seems to be spent deciding what restaurant to go to and no one knows who anyone else is, anyway.  Bateman cuts through the niceties and surface tension and just puts forth the truth of what this world is all about.  And of course if you know about predatory capitalism...

On the other hand, there's this kind of sad exchange I had with a receptionist yesterday, about New Yorkers:

Receptionist: I mean, do those people have any idea what the real world is like? 
Me: ...?
Receptionist: They have no trees, no lawns!
Me: Oh.  Well, they probably feel the same way about people here.

Sometimes I think my definition of "dark" isn't in line with other people's.

I recently finished Alan Heathcock's short story collection, Volt.  I bought it on the basis of the first story.  "The Staying Freight" is fantastic, by the way.  It's definitely on my very short list of favorite short stories, and is more pathos-ridden than the others on the list.  It's about a farmer named Winslow who accidentally runs over his only child with farm equipment, and then after the funeral decides that he must take a walk.  Though he keeps thinking that it's time to turn around and go home to his wife Sadie, he can't quite bring himself to do it, and soon he ends up on the wrong side of a mountain range.  He goes feral for a while, and when he tries to re-enter civilization by working on a stranger's farm he ends up becoming a sideshow freak, the man who can take a punch to the gut and not go down.  And it's really quite awful, especially because you can see inside Winslow and you can see that this is all he thinks he deserves, even though what he wants, by then, is to go back to Sadie.  It hit all the right notes for me, plucked all the right heart strings.  I thought it was wrenching.

With later stories, though, my emotional engagement went down.  I didn't connect to any other characters as much as I did to Winslow and Sadie, and their stories and philosophies and visions of the world started to sound the same.  I got a little bored.  A lot of reviewers seem to like Helen Farraley, the grocer-cum-sheriff, but I disliked her; she read to me as a remorseless vigilante cloaked in self-righteousness and astonishing amounts of self-pity.  She's unambiguously cast as a hero, though, toiling against a chaotic world, and although that world is full of murder and vandalism and animal-killings and vestiges of war, I never bought that this was a world any darker than the average Law & Order: SVU.  Heathcock gives his favorite characters a lot of dignity and "basic decency" (not a bad thing).  Bad people are few and far between.  Everyone gets redeemed (though their descents are not very deep).  The only story that I felt really got as strange as "The Staying Freight" was the Grey Gardens-esque "The Daughter," my second-favorite.  In the others you basically have decent folks having to deal with criminals and death and life's normal disappointments with a "traditional Midwestern" stoicism, and it all just got kind of hum-drum.  

So it's weird to see so many people comment on the grimness and darkness of Volt.  I was expecting another Blood Meridian based on the reviews.  "Abysmal world"?  The "grim, rural town of Krafton"?  "Macabre ill-luck"?  Macabre?  Really?  It baffles me because Volt is not gothic in any way.  The universe in Volt is a basically good one.  Save for the ones in "The Daughter," no character even feels anything so ugly as hate!  Here's the only negative review of Volt on Amazon: "revolting, reviling, unutterably bleak, and pointless.  I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy and some of his novels, and Flannery O'Connor came to mind, her "grotesque" characters. There's no question that this author has talent, however not as much as either of the above, I just wish he'd find something more palatable to write about."  I almost can't believe this reviewer has read McCarthy or O'Connor if they think there's any comparison here.  Roald Dahl is darker than Volt.

I thought of this again when reading about the Wall Street journal article lamenting that YA fiction is too dark.  YA authors and editors immediately leapt to the defense of the YA books that they perceived to be under attack.  I have never understood the appeal of YA or even the definition of YA since its most vigorous proponents seem to be adults, but anyway.  My general reaction to this article and all the commentary that followed was "content does not make for darkness."  The presence of profanity doesn't make a book "dark" to me (just a book with characters who use profanity).  Neither does having a character get beaten or raped or killed.  If it's an "issue book" then that applies doubly so, because then the whole point is to be an after-school special (maybe rated R; adults have their own after-school specials). 

So I've been trying to figure out what makes a book "dark" for me, and I think it's world view.  That may not be the right word, but it's the best I can do right now.  My usual example is McCarthy's The Road vs. Anything Else He's Written.  The Road horrified a ton of people, some of them Oprah's book club readers, some not, because it depicts the end of the world, cannibal tribes, people roasting babies, basically everyone being dead, the sea being black, etc.  But the whole point of The Road is the idea of "carrying the fire" despite the over-the-top desolation of the world around you, of this Christ-like little boy who neither dies nor ever compromises his virtuous qualities.  When I read this book I was like "???" because the first thing I read by McCarthy was The Crossing, which features no Christ-like characters, and a main character who, while not a bad guy, spends the last scene being abusive to a dog that needs his help, then feeling bad about it, wanting to make it up to the dog, and then being unable to find the dog.  There's no apocalypse, no over-the-top violence (compared to The Road, anyway), but I found it way more painful to read.  The Road presents a stark vision of virtue and destruction that I don't find grim or dark at all, despite all the violence.  The Crossing, though, I find grim.  Genuinely dark. 

This is not to say that I think even "real" darkness guarantees merit.  I don't.  "The Staying Freight" is neither "really" dark nor pretending to be, ends on a note of hope, and is great.  But fiction with "surface-level" darkness does seem to be in these days (though I don't know if that's what Heathcock's trying to write - probably not).  Some people respond to it and extol it, usually as reflecting reality and truth and "what the world is really like" (or in the case of The Road, it's "what the world will be like after the government is taken out"), and what seems to be a minority really object to it on grounds that it's depraved or whatnot.  And I wish more people would read The Violent Bear It Away.

This post began with a slightly meandering article by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus about the words we use to write about rape.  While I think she needs to interrogate herself as a writer a bit more - "I write about sexual violence a great deal in my fiction. The why of this writerly obsession doesn’t matter," she says, but yeah-huh, it does matter - but the beginning is a fine criticism of a New York Times article about a gang rape in Cleveland, Texas (bold mine).

The Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. There were even questions about the whereabouts of the mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill may befall the child is clearly the mother’s fault. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.

The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Little addressed the girl, the child. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her.

You do notice this a lot in news articles about rape, especially in small towns or suburban communities, and especially - maybe exclusively - when the suspects are teenaged boys.  It's as if the boys are as much a victim as the girl.  I think it can be worth investigating how a town reacts to a gang rape (Glen Ridge, NJ, for example), but sometimes I wonder: how many times do we need to hear the same opinions from these seemingly identical, wagon-circling communities?  The article claimed to be probing "how could their young men have been drawn into the act," whatever that means, but that's not actually where they went with the article.  Because then the article would actually talk about, you know, motive to rape, tendencies toward violence, domestic violence in the town, etc.  Instead the article probed "how could their young men have fucked this little girl?" (oh, she looked older than she was - got it - that means they're not pedophiles, so that's good). 

I get that the Times was soliciting neighbors' opinions and these were the neighbors' opinions, but why is this actually worth a story?  No duh, the neighbors blamed the girl and pitied the boys and bemoaned the state (reputation?) of their town.  I could have figured that in my sleep.  Why is this worth repeating and promoting in the form of an article that does not offer any analysis of their opinion?  Do they deserve some kind of public outlet because they bred a bunch of predators?  Because that might have been an interesting line of inquiry: so how and why did you instill these values in your young men, Cleveland, TX?  Otherwise, I don't care about their ruined community.  Their ruined community is not a human interest story.  Just like I do not care about how The Ryan White Story offended the residents of Kokomo, Indiana.  Sometimes towns deserve to be pilloried.  Sorry, but there it is.  I mean, this NYT article actually says:

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Classic.  Pathetic.  These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives?  What about the girl they raped?  Is it because the boys seem like a greater loss to the town, I wonder - the loss of these promising young men to the justice system, when good men are hard to find (whereas an 11-year-old girl that they all but say dressed like a whore, well, who cares, they're a dime a dozen)?  Is it overwhelming sympathy and empathy for the families of the suspects, even though as one commenter at the Rumpus suggests, they apparently raised rapists (whereas this girl's mother, well, she's the one that let this happen)?  Is it the instinct that seems to pop up whenever something bad happens in one's community, to generalize it until it's so broad that you too can claim to be personally affected and devastated, because goddamn if you're going to let this selfish child hog all the attention?  Or is it just easier to write articles about reactionary people being reactionary, predictable people being predictable?  Maybe it's just an example of communal value, and communal priorities (as Hot Fuzz says, the greater good!), overriding individual value.

In any case, Roxane Gay is one of many people to have complained about this article, and the NYTimes has issued two responses.  There are some very biting comments replying to the second response, and it's worth reading.  My favorite:

“She’s 11 years old. It shouldn’t have happened. That’s a child. Somebody should have said, ‘What we are doing is wrong.’” Implying what, it would have been fine if she was an adult? How reassuring that there's a "voice of reason" in the community.

Yes, such are the questions that we should be asking indeed.  But coverage of rape always sounds the same.

Chuck Klosterman has this interpretation for why we're living in a zombie moment (I remarked upon this a couple nights ago, when I noticed two different zombie video games being advertised on TV):

In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do.

I'm pretty sure zombie fiction is popular because it's an adrenaline rush to live vicariously through people who are slamming axes through other people-not-people's heads.  That had to be part of what it was for me.

Five years after 28 Days Later blew my mind, I think I'm exhausted of the genre.  I just don't think much can be done with it, after all.

I saw Wes Craven's My Soul To Take last night - it was actually pretty decent.  The plot was a little convoluted, with all the souls splintering and being captured and going into babies and all, but I really enjoyed the characters.  They were teenagers - "who look like they're actually in high school," as Christina said - from various social cliques who were not at all cardboard cut-outs.  They acted like actual people.  They all had flaws as well as positive traits.  No one was romanticized or vilified. 

But here's the other thing: I think that writers often get the message to build three-dimensional, realistic, balanced characters.  But part of that, and the part that I think tends to fall by the wayside, is that these lovely three-dimensional characters are still part of society.  They're influenced by social norms, by the expectations others lay on them; they feel more comfortable with some people than others.  A lot of them probably want to stay wherever they're comfortable.  And in most high school settings, they're going to be sitting somewhere within a hierarchy.  In other words, these characters need to reside in realistic social systems, IMO - realistic, of course, for whatever world has been built.  My Soul To Take totally nailed this one: the beautiful popular girl isn't going to fall for the unpopular, loser-ish outcast - she's got a reputation to maintain, or she doesn't think he'd be good for her, or she doesn't find his type attractive, or "it just wouldn't work."  Does that mean she's a shallow, selfish bitch/whore with nothing more to her?  No.  Of course not.  She's still a whole person, just like the outcast is still a whole person.  It just means they don't exist in a social vacuum. 

Of course, this is not to say that beautiful popular girls have never fallen for unpopular outcasts, or that I as a rule cannot "buy" a story where that happens.  Just that I feel like fictional characters seem to defy society a lot more than real people do.  It's also not to say that social roles are straitjackets, because that's crazy deterministic.

How important this is varies from person to person, I know.  But I've discovered that it's very important to me.  It makes me feel like there's less lying going on, usually about how good the world is (or alternately - in the case of horrific dystopic totalitarian states where EVERYTHING IS BAD and EVERYONE SUFFERS - how bad the world is).  Plus I like seeing social systems in action, I guess.  There's a reason I majored in political science.

P.S.  Watching One Missed Call 2.  Could have sworn director Tsukamoto sampled a bit of audio from one of the LOTR movies.  Only this time instead of Frodo mesmerized by the ring, we have girl being attacked by ghost.  It's all the same, really.

Scarface and Capturing the Friedmans have more in common than you might think.  Besides both being incredibly awesome watches, that is - five out of five stars to both.  Yes, I had not seen Scarface until a couple weeks ago. 

They both revolve around "reviled villains" who have been black-marked by the society they live in - 1980s Miami, 1980s upstate New York.  After brief experiences living "the good life," something has slipped, some care has not been taken, and Tony Montana and Arthur Friedman find themselves in jail, with both their social standing and family life in ruins.  Seemingly overnight, they have become hazards to society.  Communal napalm.  And they are treated appropriately.  Their friends and neighbors have either abandoned them or left death threats through the telephone.  They've become scapegoats for a complicated illness that the whole community feels, but can't pinpoint - because nobody's going to point at themselves.  Except, of course, Tony Montana and Arthur Friedman.  True pillars of the community that they are, they will gamely carry on the mantle of their social role to their deaths.  Guilty plea, blame it on me.

Notice, however - neither Tony Montana nor Arnold Friedman are saints.  They are far from it, in fact.  CtF concludes - based off Friedman's own letters - that Friedman was a pedophile and he had acted on it (but he was probably innocent in the incredibly lurid case he was prosecuted for).  Montana smuggles cocaine and kills anyone who gets in his way, and on the side he kills anyone who gets involved with his younger sister.  This isn't Salem, Mass.  It's also not Forks, Wash., with all its "what if I'm the bad guy?" bullshit.  No, these are the Bad Guys, in-the-deed-the-glory, right down to their Inevitable Downfall. 

I wish I could find Tony Montana's speech on  YouTube, but it's all shit quality.  But here's the gist - and this takes place at a very ritzy restaurant filled with rich white people, after having chased off his wife with the admonition that she's a junkie who can't have kids - "You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say 'that's the bad guy.'  So, what does that make you?  Good?  You're not good.  You just know how to hide, how to lie.  Me, I don't have that problem.  Me, I always tell the truth even when I lie.  So say goodnight to the bad guy.  Go on.  Last time you're gonna see a bad guy like this again.  Go on.  Make way for the bad guy, there's a bad guy comin' through!" 

Victimized communities is from Debbie Nathan, an investigative journalist who first suspects all the parents are participating in mass hysteria.  Not even going to try to find that clip.  Here's the policeman's quote that sets it up: "Sometimes there'd be some idle conversation about you know, another boy was sodomized five times, but my son was sodomized six times.  As if that meant something in the overall scheme of things."  And here's Nathan: "There's a whole community atmosphere that gets created in a mass abuse case like this.  There is definitely an element when a community defines itself as a victimized community, that - if you're not victimized, you don't fit into that community."

Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste