Back to the Familiar, Kurt Vonnegut & "Jailbird"

Honestly, I can't remember the last Kurt Vonnegut novel I read. Wait, that's a lie. It was "Dead-Eye Dick," and I read it back in late 2008, September, if I'm not mistaken. Vonnegut was my first "favorite writer." I finally got to reading him late in my undergrad years, and before him I thought writers could be interesting, exceedingly so actually (George Orwell being for me the paragon of that idea), but not that I could imagine conversations with them, or crazier yet, aspire to follow in their footsteps.

But Vonnegut changed that. He broke down the abstraction of a writer on a pedestal. And he's without question the one who got me thinking I'd like to write narrative fiction of my own. His stamp on my subconscious (and probably my complete consciousness) is all over my first serious story attempt. Pithy, paltry attempts at characteristically Vonnegut-style asides / interjections are hard to miss, if ever you were to read it.

Still, despite his immovable place in my mind as the writer of writers (whom I admire), I have had stylistic issues with his storytelling for quite a while now. I was underwhelmed by "Dead-Eye Dick" in truth, and others of his later career, which like many who express misgivings about his work, have left me feeling like he'd let himself become a caricature of sorts, parodying his own approach to writing, the noted metafictional elements and all -- and the best possible outcome of his doing so is he'd be aware of it, at least, which I do hope he was (and I believe he was, or at least disappointed by it).

I feel there's evidence of this in quotes like his reference to aging novelists such as himself from "Timequake", in which he said:

Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was fifty-five. Enough! My architect father was sick and tired of architecture when he was fifty-five. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now. Have pity!

He made similar, more specific statements of the sort that most writers completed their best work by age fifty-five in interviews and so forth, one interview in particular with Charlie Rose in which he made said comment was seized on and creatively edited into what became his infamously slanderous televised obituary by FOX News, a media dispensary that evidently and not terribly surprisingly didn't miss him even days after his passing. But returning to the point, which is not that FOX News is awful (although it is), but that Kurt Vonnegut seemed, if even jocularly, dissatisfied with what he was writing more or less after the time of "Slaughterhouse-Five."

Still, every career has its summit. And while I believe he had long since reached it and begun his ascent, I was particularly pleased by Timequake, which seemed to return to the Vonnegut of old in all the right ways while deftly including anecdotes told with that inimitable and cantankerous Vonnegut clarity that of itself contributed greatly to his popularity. In other words, for one book he cleanly melded old and new, and in my view produced a memorable work -- at approx. age 77 no less! Who knew? Yes, yes, I know he's inimitable, sorry. Won't happen again.

So what of "Jailbird" then? How does it factor into what was ostensibly meant to be its review (if the title of this post should carry any weight)? Maybe I'm just in a mood to like Vonnegut right now (I suspect this might be a lot of people's default setting; it's probably mine), but I really enjoyed "Jailbird" not that it did anything unusually well per Vonnegut's standard.

Nevertheless, it was told with the usual eye for happenstance and genuine concern for humanity that bleeds through his narratives -- and with plenty of humorous asides and anecdotes (particularly funny are main character Walter F. Starbuck's first one-on-one encounter with Arpad Leen and the circumstances surrounding that meeting, and a science fiction writer with whom Starbuck is acquainted (happened to be imprisoned alongside) writing a fictional account of Albert Einstein's entering Heaven -- with a twist that in Heaven the primary concern of the angels is absolving God of responsibility for the failure of humans to profit monetarily while alive. They do so by demonstrating the many opportunities, outlandish though they may have been, presented to each and every man, woman, and child who passes through the pearly gates.

Does "Jailbird" add anything special to Vonnegut's corpus? Well, no, but neither does it take anything away. Is that a profoundly ringing endorsement? I suppose not. So it goes.

(Ah, go to hell for judging me!)

Paul Auster vs. The New Yorker

The New Yorker's book critic James Wood puts forth many opinions of Paul Auster's latest novel "Invisible" and of Auster's work just generally in the magazine's recent November 30, 2009 issue. Most of his opinions are (spoiler alert) something less than what you'd consider high praise. But that's ok. I tend with varying levels of success to adhere to the Kurt Vonnegut school regarding literary criticism -- which is, at least in accordance with his following aphorism: "I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on a full suit of armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split."

Wood isn't entirely guilty of the same vitriol Vonnegut describes and disliked so. Still, he definitely takes Auster to task. And from what I've gleaned after a brief scan of the glowing Internet-scape, a lot of people have found merit in Wood's arguments. I suppose I'm one of them, although I do remain an unapologetic Auster fan. But concerning what I see as accurate in Wood's criticism of Auster is for example his initial parody and subsequent adumbration of uniquely Austerian tropes and plot devices. He also reasonably argues against Auster's prose, which especially in the examples he cites does appear simpler, Raymond Carver-esque in its austere and realist bend, and more un-ironically cliche-addled than his postmodern colleagues -- Wood says, "Auster, despite all the games, is the least ironic of contemporary writers."

However, while I think Wood does -- all told -- avoid the pitfalls of rage and loathing in his criticism of Auster, he does at times come off like an excoriator, as if his dislike of Auster's writing style, which he sees as littered with "boilerplate" and "cinemaspeak," is tantamount to it being irredeemable and deserving of the headmaster's paddle. For instance when Wood writes categorically that while ". . . there are things to admire in Auster's fiction, prose is never one of them." Wood backs this up with reasonable evidence, but one can't (or at least I can't) really shake the feeling that somewhere in all of it there is an ax being sharpened against the grindstone. Then there are what I would deem occasional potshots Wood sneaks in, for instance comparing Auster's prose to Carver's but adding, "although Carver would have written more interesting prose" or in saying that "[Auster] is only ever unwittingly funny." Speaking of the latter Wood quote, I have to admit Auster is not an author I've read for his humor, and while I don't want to touch on Wood's stating Auster is only ever unwittingly funny, I do appreciate Wood's implied concern that an author worth his or her salt should in some way be able to express a joke, inject humor where appropriate and do so cannily. Wood uses the "hilarious" novel (one I haven't read but now intend to) "The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien as Auster's use of "Hollywood plots" -- and a particular plot point he cites belonging to Auster's character Quinn in "The New York Trilogy's" "City of Glass" -- done both humorously and effectively.

Now obviously if you asked me to prove Wood is libelously false in any / all of his preceding assertions I would say that I can't do that, Dave. As already said he makes strong claims and provides useful, if possibly mischaracterized, evidence -- but he does so within the framework of a subjective set of criteria. I realize I'm moving into hazardous territory in stating that Wood's criticism is subjective and therefore implying its validity is suspect. But that's not really what I'm saying. And although I believe Wood is more excoriating than necessary, I won't fault him for his opinion of Auster's work. What I am saying is that to Wood, Auster is a peddler of banalities and sophistries; overall his work does not amount to much when stacked against the literary achievements of his contemporaries. Point taken and fair enough.

All I can offer as counterpoint, then, is a subjective defense of what I like about Auster, which -- to paraphrase -- Wood at least acknowledges there are things in Auster's work that are worthy of admiration. I recently finished reading Auster's "Man in the Dark" and really enjoyed "The New York Trilogy," the former a good example of Auster's more recent work and the latter is probably his most well-known book, which comprises his three earliest stories. One of the standard Austerian themes that "The New York Trilogy" features in parts is the disassociation and dissolution of male friendships. Of course all relationships in Auster's work are subject to just the same sort of dissolution, but none with the fury or the punctuation that seems to mark the severing of male friendships.

Ironically, these friendship breakups are usually for reasons that have little to do with an actual falling out. Instead, they are better characterized for the distance that already exists, how they've lost touch as part of a greater narrative already taking form. And often as one man disappears the other as if his doppelganger will step into his life and take his place, either literally with the unnamed friend and narrator who supplants Fanshawe as husband and father in "The Locked Room" or more figuratively with Peter Aaron as Benjamin Sachs in "Leviathan" -- after Sachs abandons everything in his life following a terrible, literal fall and his figurative reawakening in the wake of a violent encounter in the woods, or perhaps most nebulous of all is the end of Nashe and Jack Pozzi's friendship in "The Music of Chance," wherein Pozzi with Nashe's assistance escapes the pair's forced imprisonment at the home of two eccentric millionaires, the consequence of losing at a high stakes game of poker. Pozzi leaves but Nashe finds him badly beaten the next morning. Pozzi is rushed to the hospital by the overseers who are charged with ensuring Nashe and Pozzi don't escape, a complicated situation in its own right, and then Nashe is told with out any verifiable proof that Pozzi is well attended to and will survive. The tension that builds because of the dissolution of these relationships reaches a pronounced pitch, leading the narrator in "The Locked Room" on a frenzied search for Fanshawe, which at one point leads him to verbally assault a man in a bar with accusations that he is the lost Fanshawe. Benjamin Sachs is blown to bits by his own bomb, and Peter Aaron is left to answer for him to the police. Pozzi is never heard from again and Nashe, after finally being granted his freedom, drives off into the headlights of an oncoming vehicle with his overseers in the passenger seats, left to suffer whatever fate (or chance) has in store.

As for "Man in the Dark" by itself, I'll concede it impressed me less than all the other novels I list in the last paragraph. But despite its shortcomings, I still found it enjoyable and relevant. It read like a collage of the Bush administration's tenure, a sort of retrospective noting in spartan detail various causes and effects. August Brill, the narrator and for all intents and purposes the story's main character, can't sleep; he has about him the harried quality of a guilty conscience. He invents stories that play out in his head, specifically an alternate universe in which the United States is in a new civil war. He imagines a character who exists between both our universe and the alternate, and is assigned the task of murdering Brill in our world so the war will end, irrespective of the possible consequence that existence might end right along with him. Brill, however, holds all the cards as inventor of the story, and kills the man off before he can cause him any harm. He disinterestedly suggests it's the only way the story could end, but one wonders if the truth was instead that story was becoming all too real for Brill, a man it's suggested by those conspiring to kill him seems to want to die. But at the heart of "Man in the Dark" is family, and once again the dissolution of relationships (familial or other) for all the great litany of reasons: death, divorce, self-loathing, emotional vacancy, etc. I think this leads to some of the most powerful statements, which might be put better with lurid literary flourishes but in Auster's softly stated prose convey something equally powerful, as with how Brill discribes his sister's death, or perhaps more fittingly, demise:

Either her body had given out on her or she had taken pills, and I didn't want to know the answer, for neither one of them would have told the real story. Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.

Maybe I'm biased, necessary subjectivity regarding interpretation of art would suggest this is so, but I like what Paul Auster says and thinks in his writings. Maybe he is guilty of all that Wood puts forth, maybe less so than Wood can admit. I don't know. All I know is at least Paul Auster isn't Chuck Palahniuk because that guy sucks.