Guess who decided up up her reading-fu in the one week before her Life-Deciding, Five Hour Long Decathlon of a Standardized Test? I DID. Was it wise? NO NO NO. What are the primary feelings now that Five Hour Long Decathlon of a Standardized Test are finished? VAST, FATHOMLESS OCEANS OF POUNDING REGRET.
Slaughterhouse Five; Kurt Vonnegut
Allow me to introduce this by saying that Kurt Vonnegut and I do "not get along." Interpersonal relationships are involved and said relationships are rotten. I first attempted to read Slaughterhouse Five in tenth grade. In tenth grade, I was callow, acne-prone, and felt a resounding thrum in my heart every time Dire Straits came on the radio. I also had a livejournal and abused the words "random" and "awesome"*. I was, all in all, not the best judge of literature.
Slaughterhouse Five was neither kind nor sensitive to my failings. Slaughterhouse Five, in general, is neither kind nor sensitive to those with a linear sense of time. I had, and still have, a militarily linear sense of time, which meant that my initial exposure to Kurt (Can I call you Kurt?) was less a deep and searing examination of the condition of man and more of a WHAT IS HAPPENING WHAT IS GOING ON ALIENS NO I DO NOT LIKE THIS RIDE PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN I WANT TO GET OFF NO DON'T GO BACK TO DRESDEN, YOU BELONG IN NEW YORK NO NO NO. Attempts to settle my wracked brain with SparkNotes did not help and led to further steaming rage.
I said that I would read again when I Grew Older and had More Relevant Experience, but I did not mean it. Lo and behold, thanks to my HAHA STANDARDIZED TEST IN TWO DAYS? I HAVEN'T THE SLIGHTEST! induced marathon, combined with the fact that the only other books I seem to have in my house are The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Principles of Biochemistry, I decided to give Slaughterhouse Five another go. I can't say that I still completely understand it, but I can appreciate more of the themes and the prose.
The biggest problem to me personally is that reading Slaughterhouse Five is like viewing a gorgeous and brilliant work of genius through five inches of frosted glass. You grasp at the glimpses and clasp the fleeting moments of understanding, but all in all the end result is hollow and frustrated. Slaughterhouse Five is an epiphany waiting on the tip of a tongue, with no way to ferret it out. My one hope is that I'll be able to pick this book up at age 50 and finally have a thunderclap revelation. Brilliant! I'll say. Oh my god, I was an idiot! This is magnificent!
But as of now, I'll take what I can get. And for you Kurt, is a gold star for a beautiful and complex view of fatalism!
* Which may or may not have been turned into JAWSOME or PAWSOME. I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS NOW.
I would like to preface this by saying that my copy of The Last Unicorn had a cover emblazoned by a blaring, Lisa-Frank drawing of an enormous fucking unicorn gazing wistfully into a peaceful forest pool. I was mortified and clutched it face down at ALL TIMES so that no one would look at me with the eyes of judgment. The eyes of judgment being all "Jesus Christ, STOP GOING TO RENN FAIRES." Now with that out of the way:
The last unicorn, her incompetent and quarrelsome posse, and a quest.
Lyrically written and a thrumming with a love affair with lush, delectable description, Beagle's The Last Unicorn is a complicated book, that twists its way around all the tropes of the fantasy genre. The story is lovely and rich* and swimming in what are either contradictions or full-blown schizophrenia.
Personally, I prefer the latter half of the novel; the first half rests a little too handily on Creatures of Magnificent Beauty, Complicated Resolutions, and Heroic Emotions That I Will Not Explain At The Moment Because What Are You Dumb? Which sounds like a book by David Eggers and NO DO NOT WANT. Things that are on notice: stunted characters and cruel morality. Peter Beagle, if you are reading this, I will have you know that I LIKED THAT WITCH and I think it was balls of you to stomp her like that.
However, the second act, with King Haggard is beautifully tempered with a sympathy and uneasy tension missing from the first half. Beagle's tendency for soaring elegiac description is curbed by the humanity of his characters, and the added complications introduce a beautiful undercurrent of uncertainty and wistfulness**. However, the novel as a whole ends on a (relatively) upbeat note, in that the villain is vanquished, the unicorns are free and fabulous, the gayness marches on, and (mostly) everyone's alive! Take this in comparison to The Once and Future King, in which The End is basically preceded by EVERYBODY DIES, BALLS TO WIZARDRY.
* Reading through a few chapters of The Last Unicorn is a bit like eating your way out of a vat of delicious, buttermilk custard.
** A plusses especially to Beagle's unsparing but tender depiction of King Haggard. Little known fact: King Haggard can kick Holden Caulfield's ass any damn day.
The Bonfire of the Vanities; Tom Wolfe
New York City, 1980's. The city is broiling, heated by years of racial and socioeconomic strain. Investment banker Sherman McCoy and his chin stand shakily on top of a teetering metropolitan tableau, and should have switched to Geico. His hit-and-run accident punctures a tiny hole through New York's calm facade and the city's seething, repressed, unrelenting anger comes rushing out. Thankfully, Tom Wolfe is on scene to record the fall-out.
I loved this book. Wolfe absolutely vivisects his city, and he is magnificent. I'm still in the preliminary stages of recovering from the aftershock*, which means I'm rocking back and forth, incoherently muttering 'That was so good. That was so good! I... It was pretty great!'. We have to fall back on bullet points
- The Characters. When was the last time you read a novel about real people? People who weren't mere characters or traits, or quirks, or grand metaphors, or simple plot vehicles, but people of their own, controlled by their own wild and illogical impulses. Say it with me, it's been too long. Well, Wolfe has heard your cry and Wolfe promises to deliver; Bonfire of the Vanities is stuffed to the brim with complicated people. And by pitting all these people and their ambitions against each other, Wolfe recreates the achingly complex struggles that define a city. The brawls aren't always pleasant and the company not entirely wholesome, but it's a novel that actually populates the beating heart of a battered city, and does so with magnificent sympathy cut with biting clarity.
- The Detail. You know those petty little maneuvers you make when you're in Good Company? They're small and pointless and piddling, but at that moment in time, so unbelievably important? Wolfe knows them too, and he knows how you feel. That, of course, doesn't stop him from mercilessly turning the floodlights and the hounds on our individual social vanities. It's difficult to see the awkwardness and the sheer stupidity of our jousts at social oneupsmanship***, but it also adds a marvelous thoroughness and texture to the book. The situations are your situations; these people suffer from the same drives and little wants and small desperations; they are, in short, real, and Wolfe has enough love and enough hate for them to record them as they are - in full regalia, warts and all. Cheers, Tom!
- The Plot. To be crude, Bonfire of the Vanities doesn't exactly contain a lot of derring-do in its plot; it simply records the reverberations of a mistaken hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Any other novel would read like a back episode of Law and Order, but Bonfire takes its meticulous time picking apart the entire incident, and feeding it through the perspectives of characters in all different rungs of society. What emerges is a metropolis, ugly but palpable. And Wolfe never makes the mistake of pandering to our easy desires. The gap between the rich and the poor is a prickly issue; race an even thornier one, yet Wolfe never takes the simple way out. None of his characters are saints, yet none of them are villains. They are principled men, who believe in and fight for a standard, but still struggle with their spasms of doubt and selfishness and an unerring human gift for self-deception. And it is this duality that generates the surge of energy that pours through the novel. The book ends with a cyclone brewing on the steps of a courthouse, the afterword filled with corruption still festering and still rewarded, but it also ends with people still fighting and idealism still alive.
- The Writing. Let's get it out of the way. Tom Wolfe has no restraint. Multiple exclamation point skitter across entire pages, italics twist every other word, characters - and the unseen narrator - bellow in ALL CAPS when they say VERY IMPORTANT THINGS, and Strunk and White shudder and roll in their graves. And yet, everything is utterly effective. So much of this novel is streamed through a person's uncensored thoughts, and Wolfe's herky-jerky style matches up perfectly with the electrical flashes in our own minds. After all, when was the last time we measured out our own internal thoughts with careful diction and effective rhetoric****? While initially jarring, it's Wolfe's unencumbered, direct style that helps us submerge into the dankest thoughts of his New Yorkers.
In conclusion: Tom Wolfe mounts and stuffs New York like a master taxidermist, and all is good. I... need to go lay down.
* HINT: It involves a lot of soft jazz and pudding. **
** On second thought, THAT MAKES ME SOUND TOTALLY GROSS.
*** I speak as a reader who makes a habit of hiding in the bathroom stalls to avoid being that uncomfortable fifteen minutes early to a meeting. It.... I'm WORKING ON IT OK.
**** SUCK IT, E.B. White and all you articulate bastards.
No. 2 We Are Going to Marrakesh, The Extra Glenns
The fog is lifting from the water.
The bells are sounding on the boats.
And our love is a monster plain and simple.
Though you weight it down with stones to try to drown it,
It floats.
It floats.
- My Grandma, what flat, bare, and patently un-phat beats you have.
- The better to show you my plaintive, perfect lyrics my dear.
Extra Glenn's singer, John Darnielle, has a voice like a dry slap; it's muted, reedy, and has some trouble hitting all the sharps and flats, but it's also compelling in its unembellished sincerity. It's also perfect for the plain and powerful poetry of the lyrics, which rise above the usual hysterical adolescent bawls of love.
Audio: Share a song you could listen to all day on repeat.
Runner-Up:
Sturm and drang from Cam'ron. In which two long-parted lovers, played by Journey and motherfucking Gangsta Rap, are reunited in heartbreaking and glorious song. And people say culture is dead.
What it used to be: A bunch of crazed Frenchwomen slamming doors.
What is is: Absolutely beautiful. In a crazed Frenchwoman sort of way.
