Book review: Vineland, Thomas Pynchon (1990)

This was the second Pynchon novel I have tried to read, and the second one that I put down soon after starting. Pynchon doesn’t give the reader much help in the way of clues as to what is supposed to be happening and, frustrated, I ended up going to the Wikipedia page for the novel so that I could find out what the book was about. If you rely on the text itself, you will be disappointed.

In the beginning – I didn’t finish more than about 30 pages – there is a superannuated hippy who is trying to get another tranche of public funds by demonstrating his mental incapacity. He does this by jumping through a window each year. The media is present. There’s also a federal law enforcement agent who is there when he goes, dressed as a woman, through the restaurant window. The story is intended to function on the basis of the interest that this scenario elicits in the reader’s imagination.

This book (“the novel of the decade” is written on the cover) is a classic case of how a focus on style over other considerations can simply swamp a promising plot. My copy has a sticker on the front saying “$2” so, presumably, I bought it somewhere on sale.

Book review: Space Invaders, Nona Fernandez (2019)

This diminutive novel – it took me about two hours to read – is in actual fact a novella and the development of character is meagre. The action takes place over periods marked out by different years – it starts in 1981 and there is a later section dated 1994 – and involves a group of schoolchildren who are caught up in civil unrest. The author, a Chilean actress, has strong opinions about the role of representative government and this is her way of expressing them.

This author is a good name to look out for, but I personally hope that her next foray into fiction is just a tad longer. The characters needed a bit more development in order to fully engage the reader, and to pass on the messages of tolerance and equity the author cherishes.

Choosing children to convey such complex themes is interesting and I felt that this approach had tremendous promise. I was looking forward to learning more about each of the people named – we are given their surnames, as happens in secondary school everywhere – but in the end I was left feeling abandoned. Perhaps this was the author’s intention, I cannot know from this distance and having never spoken with her.

 

Book review: A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe (1998)

There’s absolutely no way, after #MeToo, that this book could be published today. But it’s not a mindless throwback to a time of endemic sexual abuse – although it is true that community standards have changed dramatically in recent decades. Being Wolfe, the book was “topical”; Wolfe started out writing as a journalist so he was attuned to changes in people’s conduct and rendered it with a journalist’s eye for detail. There are some proofing errors in the text that might have been avoided, but this novel of manners is a good read.

I bought this book, no doubt on sale (there’s a sticker on the dust jacket saying “$3”) long ago; I don’t remember when or where. It has been in my collection for years and since cleaning out the library I have been able to access books like this that have sat untouched for years. I’m glad, in this case, that I did.

The drama plays out in episodes and point of view switches between a number of key characters, sometimes even doing so within individual sections of the book. Most often, however, each chapter or section is focalised through the consciousness of a single person, for example Charlie Croker, a real estate developer and a stalwart of the Atlanta business community whose affairs are in disarray due to a downturn in the property market. Or Ray Peepgass, an employee at PlannersBanc, which had lent Croker $175 million to put up a new office tower on the fringes of the city.

Or Conrad Hensley, a young father in Oakland, just west of San Francisco, who works in a distribution centre operated by Croker’s company. Or Roger Too White, a black Atlanta lawyer whom the mayor of the city ropes in to help defuse a delicate situation with a racial angle. The mayor’s target is none other than Croker. 

Race and the poor conduct of men in regard to women are subject to Wolfe’s forensic gaze (Wolfe would return to the latter of these themes, in more detail, in 2004’s ‘I Am Charlotte Simmons’) but so, too, is Capital and the ways that people pursue meaning in their lives. Croker surprises and Hensley turns out to have a major impact on the direction, at the end of the book, the story takes. But does this tale have the authenticity of lived experience? 

Wolfe’s fictional tactics are to use episodes of carefully-examined narrative to build the dramatic arc and to create suspense. You are presented with heavy pages of prose that are replete with the minutiae of life, such as the scene that presents itself to White, one day, when he attends a service in a church in a poor part of the city. The people around Roger, the preacher on the stage, the choir, the organist, the politician who comes in to make a speech: all of it is rendered delicately in Technicolor so that you get an experience approximating reality. The texture of the place and the people are openly on display. 

Wolfe also examines work in some detail, which is unusual. This is a theme that has been more recently addressed by Halle Butler in ‘The New Me’, which is about a woman who works in offices. Wolfe’s approach has similarities with respect to Butler’s.

One cogent detail is Wolfe’s use of the word “hive” to refer to the rumour mill that animates a society. He also brings in internet culture in the form of a blog where a story at the centre of the drama first appears. When I read these sections of the book I was reminded of a book by two American authors titled ‘The Hive’, which I reviewed last month. Baden and Lyga posit a dystopian future where social media is weaponised by the authorities in order to control people’s behaviour. This scenario is very Wolfian, although their book is for the YA market (it’s still a good read, in case you’re interested).

In many ways, ‘A Man in Full’ revisits ground Wolfe covered in ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ of 1987. The difference however is in more than just a change of scene – from New York to Atlanta. In the later novel, Wolfe also explores, as far as he is able to given the constraints placed on him by his method, the notion of secular signification. 

He doesn’t use much poetry to achieve his aims; the subtlety is all in the same kind of method that production companies use when making a sitcom. Characters are shown talking to one another and the fabric of the setting – whether in an office in a commercial building or in a banquet hall in a public space – is described with all of its attendant details along with their common meanings. The dialogue is rendered with the kind of authenticity that Walter Scott achieved two centuries ago, and some of it is hard to understand (for example, in scenes in a prison) but translations are provided to get the reader through the difficult parts.

There is a kind of poetry in this way of dealing with characters and places, but Wolfe doesn’t use poetry in the same way that many authors have done since the big changes in the way of writing prose arrived a century ago. He had a journalist’s reverence for facts; interiority is often rendered using snippets of prose separated by ellipses rather than with a more (now) conventional stream-of-consciousness. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating novel and I recommend it as a way to revisit a past that is, now, gone, even though only recently so.

Visual disturbances: Seven

There are 58 files in this selection and they were taken with a digital camera between 9.08pm on 31 December 2007 and 12.26am on 1 January 2008. I took a total of 140 images that night at the Rocks and, while walking back to the train station, on some of Sydney central business district’s dark streets. Most of the people at the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks are young. Every year there is a special display of incendiary devices at 9pm for children, then a longer display at midnight for the rest of the folk.

I didn’t know at the time these photos were taken that 2008 would be a difficult year. From the middle of August until the first week of October I would suffer terribly and, to get through the troubles, on a daily basis I would go swimming. In the end, this contrivance worked a sort of magic.

In some cultures photography itself is seen as a kind of magic. In Australia, for example, the media routinely puts out a warning, in cases where a story they are about to broadcast contains the images of a dead person who had belonged to an Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander community, telling people what is going to be included in the visual material to be shown. It’s as though, for such people, the soul of the person seen in the image had been somehow captured in the process of making a photo. So it’s fitting, as in the present case and as in the photos in other posts in this series, that my images here are intentionally blurred or otherwise distorted.

Before this publication, I never thought to use these photos, judging them to be of poor quality due to the imperfections in the form of distortions – the visual disturbances I see today – that combine to create a distinct charm. We don’t always see what is valuable when something first happens, and things that might seem, like my illness, to be a disaster, can have unexpected, and positive, consequences, such as the photos I published this year.

Time works its magic and alters everything it touches. Things that transcend time also contain mystery in the way they can remind us, albeit imperfectly and obliquely (unless we are exceedingly well-informed) of that foreign place, the past.