A Better World, or The Idea of America

 

It’s become fashionable over the past decade or so for left wing intellectual types such as myself to claim that they hate America and Americans. This is those of us living outside the US, of course. I’ve always felt uneasy agreeing with that kind of sentiment, if only because there are something like a quarter of a billion Americans. I figure that a great deal of those people must be intelligent, kind and generous, in various measures. Of course, if by America we are referring to George W. Bush, the War on Terror, Enron, Halliburton and the loathsome Dick Cheney, then yes–I hate America too. But there is, in fact, another side to the U S of A, a pure idealism that no other country can claim to have equalled. What am I on about? I guess I’m referring to organisations such as the Library of America, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to reprinting and keeping in print the works of fiction by America’s greatest writers. Names like Faulkner, Carver, Chandler and O’Connor are to be kept in the nation’s consciousness forever through keeping their works in print in perpetuity At least that’s the idea. What other country can claim such a project? When I received my copy of The Complete Works of Flannery O’Connor in the post yesterday (sent to me by another American invention, Amazon.com), I felt I was holding in my hands the idea of America.

Now, of course it’s true to say that the reality of America has rarely equaled these lofty ideas, and as such there is a whole tradition of discontented American writers reporting on the sorry state of their nation. And I have been profoundly influenced by many of these writers. Writers such as Raymond Chandler, Philip K Dick, William S Burroughs, John Crowley, Barry Malzberg, James Tiptree Jr, Jeff Vandermeer, and more recently Harry Crews have meant the world to me. I have been, in a very real sense, Americanised by the worldviews of these writers, to say nothing of the crass consumer culture I have been subjected to, whether willingly or not, on every day of my life.

Recently I happened upon a website called betterworldbooks.com, an innovative project to recycle unwanted books that would otherwise end up in landfill. The books are sold at a nominal price (usually $4) and proceeds go to various causes supporting literacy worldwide. I’ve no idea what percentage of the cover price ends up funding these projects or how effective the strategy is on the whole. I could find out. But the idea, the idea, is so beautiful as to be breathtaking. This is the America I love. Better World Books will ship to Australia for $4 postage per book, so you end up paying $8 US for a book (like $8.50 Australian at the moment). So this is significantly cheaper than secondhand books in Australia, the selection is FAR wider than any bookstore you’ll ever set foot into, and it’s for a worthy cause. Delivery times are good too. I placed two orders recently and both arrived within 3 weeks. That’s slightly quicker than Amazon (3-4 weeks) and signifcantly quicker than Fishpond (4+ weeks). So I ordered another 13 books – 5 of which are for my wife.

And the writers? All Americans bar one. Carter Scholz, Ken Kalfus, Jeff Vandermeer, a biography of Raymond Chandler, and one lone Englishwoman, Pat Barker.

 

I highly recommend this service.

 

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/

 

Two short reviews – Body and Scar Lover by Harry Crews

There have been two distinct phases in Harry Crews’ literary career. The first, spanning from the publication of his first novel The Gospel Singer in 1968 to that of A Childhood in 1978, can be dubbed his early career. This includes eight novels and one memoir. Then there was a hiatus of nearly a decade, ending in 1987 with the publication of All We Need of Hell. This second blooming produced six full length novels, the last of these being Celebration, published in 1998. In the decade since then, only the novella length An American Family has been published. So, as you can see, Harry Crews has basically had two decade long bursts of publishing spanning the past 40 years. And while everything I have read from Crews’ early phase has been astonishingly good, I am yet to be convinced that the later phase produced work anywhere near the same quality. Body (published 1990) and Scar Lover (published 1992) are novels of this later phase, and while both have their moments, they are both flawed works.

In Body we are introduced to a character familiar to readers of Crews’ The Gypsy’s Curse, Russell “Muscle” Morgan. He is preparing a female bodybuilder,  Shereel Dupont, for a Miss Universe competition. It turns out that Shereel’s real name is Dorothy Turnipseed, and that her family is about to descend on the hotel where the competition is to be held, with dangerous and eventually explosive results. There are a few memorable characters herein, the most memorable being Shereel’s fiancee Nail Head, who is a sight to behold.

Some people have found this to be an amusing, even hilarious book, but it didn’t do it for me. The characters feel like caricatures, the plot is thin, the book as a whole overladen with dialogue. Though it was true that Body did improve in the second half, I couldn’t help but feel that the younger Crews would have compressed this material into little more than 100 pages, like he did with Car. At 280 pages or so, this is a slow, bloated book, and a far cry from the exceptional The Gypsy’s Curse.

I wanted to like Scar Lover, and at first I wasn’t disappointed. Initially, this seemed to me to be a gritty, harrowing read quite unlike the breezy Body. The first part of the novel was excellent. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, Pete Butcher, a down-at-luck young man living in Florida in the 1950s. Interestingly, this is the first Crews novel I’ve read set in a different historical moment to the time of composition. Butcher is a little like Crews himself, or rather a little like how Crews might have been had he not made it through university after serving in the Marine Corps. Pete Butcher works in a boxcar unloading packages of cellophane (which we are told are very heavy) alongside a huge Jamaican man named George. Pete has also just started to fall for his neighbour, a woman called Sarah Leamer. Turns out that Sarah’s mother has breast cancer and, as Pete discovers, maybe Sarah has it too. As I said, the first half is gritty and real in a way that reminds me of Philip K Dick’s mainstream novels, like Humpty Dumpty in Oakland or In Milton Lumky Territory. But then it all falls apart.

The second part of this book is horrible. Words can’t describe. The plot is ridiculous (a pair of Rastafarians and their followers help Pete steal Sarah’s father’s corpse back from the mortuary, before burning it on a funeral pyre in a swamp), the characters thinly drawn (especially the dominatrix Linga), and the dialogue unending. For a writer who claimed, rightly, to have a ‘clean strong line of narrative’ in his novels, fashioned after Graham Greene, Scar Lover fails to live up to the mark. The further it goes, the worse it gets, which is a shame, as everything up to Harry Leamer dropping down dead is well worth reading. And so I conclude my short reviews of these two later Harry Crews novels with the observation that both books are half good: the second half of Body and the first half of Scar Lover.

Read sample of The Kingdom of Four Rivers online!

My publisher, Equilibrium Books, has just upgraded their site to allow people to read the first 18 pages of The Kingdom of Four Rivers online. It works much in the same way as Amazon.com’s ‘Look Inside’ feature.

My novel’s page on the Equilibrium website:

http://www.equilibriumbooks.com/kingdom.htm

Direct link to the sample of The Kingdom of Four Rivers:

http://www.freado.com/player/bookplayer.php?contentid=4804&authorid=3779&preview=1

The good people at Equilibrium will be implementing this system for a number of other books  in the coming weeks, so be sure to check out the samples of some of the other books. Happy reading!

Two short reviews – The Gypsy’s Curse and Car by Harry Crews

Part of me was expecting to be disappointed by the two novels collected in Classic Crews along with A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. From what I had read about Harry Crews, it seemed that I might already have read Crews’ best two books in the aformentioned A Childhood and the novel A Feast of Snakes. I am happy to report that no such thing happened. What follows are short reviews that I fear will not do justice to these outstanding novels.

The Gypsy’s Curse introduces us to a very strange cast of characters. The narrator, Marvin Molar, has stumps for legs and walks everywhere on his hands. He’s about three feet tall. He can’t speak or hear. Marvin lives in a gym with an old strongman by the name of Al, who frequently refers to himself in the third person. He once had his head run over by a car (deliberately, to prove how strong he is) and now his ear looks like a cauliflour. Leroy is a boxer who got beaten up so badly that he now stumbles around, ‘punch drunk’ in perpetuity. And Pete is an old black man who is so weak that even Leroy can beat him up easily. This unlikely cast reside in Al’s gym, where strongmen and iron freaks buff their physiques daily. Everything changes when Marvin’s girlfriend Hester moves into the gym, and a cycle of increasing violence is started.

That’s the story of The Gypsy’s Curse in a paragraph, and I can see that I’m not doing much of a job in trying to explain why this book is simply a work of genius. I am going to have to come back to this in a year or so and see if I can’t work out how Crews did it. I’m stumped. This is just a book of amazing worth and everyone should read it. The only thing I’ll say against it is that it ends in predictable violence, just like A Feast of Snakes did. I hope Crews has other ways of ending his books than in mass bloodshed.

 

I suppose it’s fair to say that I regard Car as a lesser work than the three Harry Crews books I had read before it, which isn’t to say that it’s a book without worth. It certainly is, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to J. G. Ballard’s Crash, which I believe came out at a very similar time. Okay, I just checked. Crews’ novel actually preceded Ballard’s by a year, but where Crash is fairly famous and has had a film made from it, Car is just about out of print (except in this Classic Crews collection) and forgotten. Why is this? The books are quite similar in terms of their theme – that cars equals sex equals violence. I suppose the Ballard novel is more detailed, and less humorous.

In Car, Easy Mack presides over 43 acres of scrapped cars in Jacksonville, Florida. At book’s opening, we see Easy’s son Mister crushing Cadillacs. It turns out that Mister has a twin brother Herman who has run away for some reason. Then it transpires that he has become affiliated with a hotel owner named Homer Edge, and that Herman is planning on eating a brand new Cadillac, bumper to bumper. He tries… and fails. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but then this isn’t much of a book, in terms of pages anyway. At a little over 100 pages, Car is more novella than novel, and in fact it may have worked better at a still shorter length. Despite these caveats, this is a little gem of a book with some powerful scenes and imagery. To conclude this review, I’m quoting a paragraph in which Herman realises that by eating the car, he is becoming the car:

“If he needed more air he’d turn on the air-conditioner. If he needed more strength, he’d burn a higher octane gasoline. If he needed more confidence, he’d get another hundred horses under the hood. If the light of the world bothered him, he’d tint his windshield. And his immortality lay in numberless junkyards, all easily accessible from anywhere in America. Go on down and replace his fender, replace his wheel, replace his engine even, replace everything until he was not even what he was when he started. Replace everything with all things until he was nobody because he was everybody.” (Classic Crews, p382)

I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the three books (two novels, one memoir) comprising Classic Crews are among the greatest examples of narrative I’ve ever read. If I wasn’t already jaded and cynical at my grand old age of twenty-eight about the state of the world and the prestige afforded its greatest proponents of narrative fiction, I’d wonder why Harry Crews isn’t substantially more recognised than he is. Then I think of Marvin Molar and I know why.

Harry Crews is a first rate writer; you should order this book immediately.

A reading list for summer (5/11/09)

I haven’t actually got any money at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped me from ordering a whole heap of books from Fishpond and Amazon. I periodically suffer reading cravings , maybe every four or life months, and during those times, I don’t only have to read, I have to read particular books by particular authors, even if I don’t currently own said books. So here’s a list of the books I’m anticipating sinking my teeth into over the next three months or so:

Car by Harry Crews

Celebration by Harry Crews

The Mulching of America by Harry Crews

Body by Harry Crews

Scar Lover by Harry Crews

Florida Frenzy by Harry Crews (essays by the author)

Blood and Grits by Harry Crews (essays by the author)

Getting Naked with Harry Crews (a book of interviews)

Perspectives on Harry Crews (essays about the author)

The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner

The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven by Alan Warner

The Sopranos by Alan Warner

Finch by Jeff Vandermeer

Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer (non fiction, about the writing and marketing process)

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (biography)

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (a Library of America edition that remarkably only costs $16 US from Amazon)

Mr Muo’s Traveling Couch by Dai Sijie

The Crazed by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

The Pickup Artist by Terry Bisson

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

 

That’s 22 books, and the O’Connor volume is really at least 4 books in 1. The credit card is taking a hammering.

Book Review – Morvern Callar by Alan Warner

Morvern Callar is Alan Warner’s first novel. The sequel is These Demented Lands. Of course, I read them in the wrong order, but never mind. Morvern Callar the character is a young woman living in the Scottish port town of Oban, and on the first page of the book she discovers her boyfriend’s corpse in their flat. He’s killed himself. This is where this novel diverges from traditional expectations, as instead of reporting her grisly find to the police, Morvern listens to some music, gets ready to go out, goes to a few pubs and clubs, and generally has a good time. Is she is shock and soon to come to her senses? Apparently not. And that is one of the great strengths of Morvern Callar the novel: it shatters audience expectations.

I like Warner’s writing on a number of levels, but there are some annoying aspects that I can’t seem to get over at the moment, so I’ll get them out of the way here and get on with the positive side of my review. Firstly, there’s no apostrophes in the book, which I find really grating. So ‘didn’t’ is ‘didnt’ and suchlike. Cormac McCarthy seems to do this too. Secondly, there’s no quotation marks for speech. None! Doubly annoying. This is an aspect of so-called ‘postmodern’ writing I can do without – the deliberate omission of functional punctuation. Quotations aren’t there to look cool, they’re there to do a job. This leads me to think of Warner as a bit on the self-consciously pretentious side. It could be argued that these omissions are due to the fact that Morvern herself has a low level of literacy, and given that she is the narrator, this might seem warranted. But I don’t think this is justified, as Warner explains that his character could never have written the words in this novel anyway. So the point is lost. If this was the point, then Warner would have had to have done away with punctuation altogether. That reminds me of some of the essays I have to read in my job, only 240 pages long. The horror.

I’m not done with the things that annoyed me about Morvern Callar. This next one is a biggie. The phrase ‘I used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut’ (which is presumably a brand of cigarette) is repeated at least fifty and perhaps one hundred times throughout the book. Yes, there are subtle variations, but essentially this phrase crops up on something like one in every two pages. Had Warner written ‘I lit a cigarette’, the phrase would have been perfectly anonymous, but the author’s insistence on itemising trivial details and brands prevents him from doing this. Yes, yes, it’s all about the character and how she is caught up in a world of brands and material possessions. I get the point. But it annoyed me all the same. My fourth complaint is that the book is littered with specific artist/album/track information about what Morvern is listening to at any given time. I think it’s fair to say that such information takes up five percent of the book.

All right. That’s enough complaining. Despite these annoyances, I did enjoy reading Morvern Callar. What we have here is a modern existential drama that owes more than a little to the French (Sartre and Camus). Interestingly, even though this novel is told in the first person, there’s almost nothing in the way of interior monologue. Think about that for a minute. How can you have a novel in this mode without information about what the character is thinking at any given time? Warner proves that it can be done but, as a consequence, the narrative becomes detached and impersonal. Thus we read of Morvern’s amoral debauchery (and there is plenty of that) without any sense that she is repentent, remorseful, or otherwise sorry.

About half way through the narrative, Morvern chops her boyfriend’s body up and buries the pieces in the mountains. Worse, she steals the novel he’d completed before his death, and publishes it to great acclaim under her own name. Here my blood was boiling and I began to hate this character. With the advance from the publisher, Morvern goes on a drinking/drugging/partying spree in Spain, and when she returns, she discovers that her dead boyfriend has left her his inheritance as well. Cue more partying, a lot more. Finally the money is gone and Morvern is forced to return to Oban again. This is hedonism to the nth degree, and Warner offers no apology. Morvern doesn’t get her comeuppance and the police don’t discover her boyfriend’s body. And so the reader, depending on his/her perspective, might be left floundering.

There are a number of other positive elements I haven’t really discussed here. Warner writes very vividly of Oban and surrounds, and many passages are quite beautiful. Many of the shenanigans described herein are very amusingly told. There’s a lot of local slang that I enjoyed trying to translate. So ‘oxters’ must be underarms, to ‘boak’ is to vomit, to be ‘rampant’ is to be aroused and ‘Strathclyde’s Finest’ are the police.  In summary, Warner is a wily fox of a writer who sets traps for the unwitting reader. It would be easy to become outraged by Morvern Callar, and in a different time and place this is exactly the kind of book that would be denounced and even banned. But I will feel no outrage. I will get over it and read The Man Who Walks next.