The Public Burning - Robert Coover

From planes, cars, trains, ships, and buses, they debouch upon the city in a breathless rush and scatter, squealing in awe and umbrage, clicking cameras, streaming through the narrow streets in their patterned sportshirts and J.C. Penney dresses like blind and anxious ants, hot on the trail of the unknown. There are bright clusters of them at Rockefeller Plaza, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, crawling all over each other, going where the others go, seeing what the others see. The Battery. The United Nations. The Waldorf-Astoria. Scurrying about, chasing temptations, ogling heights, asking directions, bumping into each other, dropping parcels, taking bus tours, panicking at intersections, getting lost. Some find themselves on the subway while looking for the men's room. Some try to leap off the Empire State Building or photograph the burlesque shows, others get off at the wrong stop on the Third Avenue El and miss everything. They consume staggering quantities of egg rolls, shish kebab, knishes, French doughnuts, Hungarian goulash, oyster stew, and pizza pie, lick millions of postage stamps, trample hotel carpets to shreds, and wrinkle, stain, and burn holes in enough sheets to tent the nation. They get aroused by streetwalkers, maligned by cabdrivers, lectured in Union Square, sunburned at Coney Island, and raped in Central Park.
-pg. 165-6

This book begins after Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas granted the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg a stay of execution and ends three days later when they are put to death by electrocution. Although the events are real, Coover deviates wildly from the script of history, and in perhaps the most inspired decision of the book, allows then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon to narrate over half of the action, who, as a character, turns out to be a sweating, bumbling, fumbling, suspicious, paranoid, mess of a man, although ingeniously presented so as to provide the only real bit of pathos in the entire farce. Coover uses some funny gimmicks, the most prominent of which is that the idea of Uncle Sam is transformed into a flesh-and-blood superhero, kicking ass in Korea, fighting the Phantom, his ubiquitous Commie nemesis, all over the world, keeping the light of America alive at home, and generally directing the energies and excesses of the grandeur that is America towards life, liberty and the pursuit of un-American activities. A few of the others he shoehorns in right from the get-go are Time Magazine as the young Poet Laureate, the New York Times as some monument to which you make a pilgrimage, and, as above, the chaos and crass consumption that epitomizes Times Square serving as a totem for all that is hallowed in this America of Coover's imagination.

But is it so richly imagined? Is it, as it were, inspired? To say so would be to deny the ugliness of a reflection, to blame a mirror for its accuracy rather than because of its warp and wobble. For all the inventiveness thrown in, for every ridiculous exaggeration, there is an element of truth that clings and leaves a stink, like shit stuck on your shoe, and as the shit accrues, it becomes incredibly difficult not to be disturbed by this vision of America, by a vision of America that, while absurd, rings true.

The prose is both maddening and delightful; Coover has an ear for every carnival barker's braying voice, every Congressman's whinging cavil, every man on the street's pedestrian petulance, and he's got the poetry of the prurient press down pat. The most remarkable accretions of sheer language come spilling out of Uncle Sam's mouth, mashing all pioneers' ho-hum hokum platitudes, jingoism's jangly jargon, liberty's lies, democracy's delusions, and Coover lets it all hang out with respect to literary device. Snatches of plays, opera, and poetry infiltrate the text like spies, and language is--becomes--like some cold war, with beauty on the one side and ugliness on the other, seething in some not-truce because of mutually assured destruction, and at the center of it all is Tricky Dick's self-centered whining voice, plotting, doubting, going on mock offensives, falling back to lick old wounds, rallying to stand at center stage to declare: All life, all of it, is but a play within a play. And like any good American, he's convinced he's the main character.

A Heart So White by Javier Marias

"The friendship or business relationship between our fathers sometimes brought us together, although he was always closer to the adults, more interested in their world, as if impatient to form a part of it and to act independently, I remember him as a child old before his time or a frustrated adult, a man condemned to remain too long in the incongruous body of a boy, obliged to endure a fruitless wait that consumed him. It wasn't that he took part in the adults' conversations, he was devoid of pedantry -- he just listened -- it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he's not yet allowed to enter... He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity."

A Heart So White is, on its surface, about a suicide in a family, and how that suicide comes to haunt the next generation. But the book, narrated by Juan, a translator by occupation, is essentially a rumination on many fine topics, including the nature of secrets, language, marriage and memory. Of particular concern to Juan is the relationship between what could have happened and what actually did happen, and whether there is any difference between the two, given the weakness of our memories and our tendency to lovingly dwell on missed opportunities and the dreamy future. I could discuss this further, as well as the role that storytelling and language play in such a dynamic, but then again I could drop it altogether, which, if Marias or Juan is to be believed, amounts to the same thing anyway. Such a state of affairs should make me despair, but it really doesn't, and I suppose that's one of the nice things about literature: we can choose which books we treat as scripture.

That is not to say that this is a bad book or that Marias is a bad writer. To the contrary, A Heart So White is well written, and full of provocative images and phrases that are repeated and eventually spiral in on each other as Juan unwillingly enters the vortex of his family history. With its emphasis on language, and the hall-of-mirrors effect produced by his use of doubles and possible coincidences, it could be a good candidate for anyone wanting to break out the analytical toolkit that has gone dusty with neglect since college. (This was the game I played for a while before happily giving up.) There is also one brilliant and hilarious scene in which Juan, the translator, spices up a staid meeting between two government officials from different countries by translating a benign request for tea as, "Tell me, do the people in your country love you?"

But in the end, with its detached, ironic tone, the book felt rather bloodless, and was hard to love.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

"He wanted to fight. He shot at me like a plane from a catapult, reaching for my knees in a diving tackle. I sidestepped and reached for his neck and took it into chancery. He scraped the dirt hard and got his feet under him enough to use his hands on me where it hurt. I twisted him around and heaved him a little higher. I took hold of my right wrist with my left hand and turned my right hipbone into him and for a moment it was a balance of weights. We seemed to hang there in the misty moonlight, two grotesque creatures whose feet scraped on the road and whose breath panted with effort."

I had long avoided Chandler, mostly because I've never understood the appeal of the tough-guy writer, a uniquely American figure who, from Ernest Hemingway to James Frey, shoots out ink as if it were a measure of his virility. And to be sure, Chandler's world-weary detective, Philip Marlowe, is full of wry machismo and hard-boiled verve. You know the type: impervious to womanly seductions, calm in the face of danger, and ready at all times to deliver a deadpan quip.

But that prose! The phrase "a balance of weights" is an apt description of his style, with each sentence in perfect poise. The series of "ands," often used by writers to lend a kind of biblical weight and rhythm to their prose (Cormac McCarthy, another tough guy, being the most egregious offender), here passes by almost unnoticed, and lends the passage a hard, smooth sheen, as if it were a frozen lake across which the reader skates effortlessly. I also like the camera-like quality of it: the intense close-up of wrist and hand that eventually gives way to the striking silhouette of two men wrestling in the moonlight.

The plot is as good as it is irrelevant. The staples of detective fiction are all there: blackmail, kidnapping, murder, etc. The best type of book to have on a long plane ride or a hungover Sunday.

Voss - Patrick White

'Laura Trevelyan was at that moment tracing with her toe the long, ribbony track of some sea-worm, as if it had been important. In the rapt afternoon all things were all-important, the inquiring mouths of blunt anemones, the twisted roots of driftwood returning and departing in the shallows, mauve scum of little bubbles the sand was sucking down, and the sun, the sun that was hitting them over the heads. She was too hot, of course, in the thick dress that she had put on for a colder day, with the result that all words became great round weights. She did not raise here head for those the German spoke, but heard them fall, and loved their shape. So far departed from that rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural. She did not care. It was lovely. She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep. Herself disembodied. Air joining air experiences a voluptuousness no less intense because imperceptible.'

-pg. 57

Voss is about a man driven by a single-minded purpose to map the Australian interior, and perhaps it's fitting that this was the first of Patrick White's books I've ever read, since from the first two sentences it felt like I'd discovered a mysterious and hidden world, old as stone, that was just waiting to be roamed over, plumbed, fathomed, explored. The prose, as can be seen above, is weighty; White's style is capable of alternating from the minutely particular to all-encompassing accuracy from polished period to polished period, and the unflinching seriousness of the ideas and themes are brilliantly punctuated by a devious humor. In many ways, he reminds me of Faulkner, with his ability to wreath the story round with elements of legend, or mythology, born not out of classical allusion or grand deities, but the memorializing lies all people tell themselves of themselves.

Voss, the explorer, is a man driven by an ideal. While his purpose is to explore Australia and tame the wild desert with his body and mind, he is also on a quasi-mystical quest, which can best be described as an attempt at apotheosis. He is, to his own mind, a god of the wilderness, and the aboriginals of the land he seeks to conquer he views as his natural subjects; the expedition is simply a test of this belief, and his success will be determined by whether or not he has overcome all of his human weakness. But while he is preparing for the trip, gathering supplies and men and plotting out his expected course, he unexpectedly falls in love with Laura Trevelyan, the orphaned niece of the expedition's primary sponsor.

It is this odd love affair that dominates the book, despite the fact that the bond they share is unacknowledged until after Voss takes off for the desert. They share a psychic link by which they are able to communicate, even across the vast expanse that lies between them, and they often turn to each other when under some particular stress. Voss and his party inevitably endure the inevitable hardships of any adventure narrative—thirst, hunger, hostile natives, mutiny—and Laura must persevere in Sydney’s stuffy society. The connection between the two lends a stark, parched quality to the society scenes, and an oppressiveness to the vast and open desert lands, and Laura and Voss seem to become the only free individuals in a book filled with ex-convicts, madmen, property-owned people and those hemmed in by society’s strict proprieties, and yet their freedom is built on a dependence on one another, almost a shackling.