Plato's Republic. Machiavelli’s The Prince. Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The Bible. These are famous books, world-shaping books. They are the cultural currency which shapes many a political and academic de-bate. And yet, few people have actually read them.
Oh sure, everybody has fingered through their obligatory copy of the Bible to see if there really is a precept against onanism (there is) or how many wives Abraham had (two?). But how many people have really read the Word of God cover to cover? Precious few. And when you leave out the Bible belt, that slim percentage drops to almost nil.
Yet we all have opinions about what these books say, what they mean, and whether oth-ers should read or not read them. People describe others as Machiavellian or denounce social Darwinism in ignorance of what the authors actually said (before I get irate letters, I am perfectly aware that Darwin gave nothing to social Darwinism but his name - though I still haven’t read T.O.O.S.). So it seems less an insult than the continuation of a trend to write book reviews for books I've started, but haven’t quite finished. I may not be as much of a pioneer as I hope - I suspect many a book reviewer has not actually finished every book they’ve reviewed. How can they? Some are over a thousand pages(!) No doubt they continue the practice honed in our fine academic institutions: they skim just enough to get the zeitgeist of a work and then hold forth at length upon it, drawing solely from the small portion they’ve read.
A word in general: while I can’t claim these books were the type to grab me in a must-keep-awake-at-night-till-I-finish-it rapture, they were all much better written than most books, and their authors have been heralded by much smarter men (and women) than I as the undeniable balls-out "killer apps" of the literary world that they are.
Overall: insightful, witty, introspective and mesmerizing are a few good words to de-scribe Eggers’s work. His story (at least the portion I read) strikes a balance between ex-pressing the pain of grieving and the inherent absurdity that accompanies the lost of a loved one. Eggers describes a world so mundanely horrible that the characters have to continually convince themselves that this is, truly, what their lives have become, and not some horrible nightmare.
His descriptions are haunting, daunting, and terrible (as in "her feverish eyes were smol-dering and terrible," not "the rotting corpse smelled terrible.") Each sentence seems a bare presentation of the facts, depicting the pain of the protagonists' grief.
But everything else about the book, from the formatting to the author's own comments, attempts to undermine the legitimacy of that pain. Starting with the non-standard legal disclaimer found on the back of the title page (which features a diagram representation of the author's sexual orientation on a scale of 1 to 10) to the title itself (which is quickly abridged to A.H.W.O.S.G. for the right-side page header in the rest of the book), Eggers's playful manipulation of form and change of tone on any given page serve as a potent counterpoint to the novel's overflowing sorrow. This conflict between bare factual pres-entation and playful digression is prevalent throughout the work, and thank God it is. If the author took his own story half as seriously as we might expect him to, every reader would need 1,000 milligrams of Prozac and a therapist just to get through it.
The only problem with the writing is there is no discernible plot. No building action, no driving conflict, other than the aforementioned fight for hope. Just a long, nightmarish description of one character's trying life.
Indeed, Eggers is the only author I’ve read who admits so wholeheartedly the failings of his own work. In the preface, he recommends skipping the preface and the middle of the book (pages 209-301) as well as all the pages up to 109. How innovative.
Infinite JestHamlet. I met someone in college who wrote his thesis on this one book by Wallace; he spent over a year on it. From the hundred pages I read, I could barely extract any meaning; it seemed a jumbled collection descriptions of socially my-opic unhappy people.
The footnotes reminded me of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. In both books, one begins to suspect the purpose of the footnotes is to learn to ignore the footnotes, a sort of intentional denial of the outer context of the world. Which I suppose is perfectly appropriate. Wallace’s characters inhabit the insular worlds of tennis clubs and private schools.
Overall, the literary equivalent of solving differential equations that describe the arch and path of each hair in an elephant’s navel. But I’m being overly harsh in an attempt at hu-mor; while his opus is not for the faint of heart, it is well worth the effort.
Declining to be on Oprah despite his book's selection for Oprah’s venerable "Book of the Month Club," being compared to Don DeLilo, exalted as the new Tom Wolfe - Franzen has it all.
Here's a review from Newsweek, which may be taken as representing the general response among the literarily-inclined: "the last 100 pages of The Correc-tions is an unforgettably sad, indelibly beautiful piece of literature...[Franzen] is a writer with talent to burn."
This blurb suggests to me that at least one reviewer has taken to reading the last 100 pages and not the first.
For the uninitiated, The Corrections concerns the inner workings of a normal dysfunctional family in the early nineties, among other things. Which begs the question - are we really so far removed from those bygone days that we’re comfortable analyzing it with the precision of a gleeful surgeon?
Franzen’s book held for me the same fascination as a vivisection. He skillfully lays bare the innards of those who are still living, breathing realities for most of us. His book may be written for the ages, when the world of the early 1990s is truly lost, and its meticulous depiction will be valued much as we value Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as a vehi-cle for cross-temporal mind-set translocation. In the here-and-now, it strikes a little too close to home.
Overall overall: read at least enough of each to be able to proclaim, loudly and in the manner of someone who has drunk just enough at a cocktail party to be tipsy, that you do not like them.
Posted by John on January 9, 2002
Tags: Books, Reviews
Comments on specific paragraphs:
Click the
icon to the right of a paragraph
Comments on the page as a whole:
Click the
icon to the right of the page title (works the same as paragraphs)