The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

"Scobie thought: what are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her -- don't wear that dress, don't say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I've made of her. She wasn't always like this."

The Heart of the Matter is set in a West African town by the ocean, during World War II. The town is occupied by the British, but there are Indians and Syrians there, too, as well as the natives -- it is the original Tower of Babel in the words of one character. The British authorities are primarily occupied with the ships that come to port, searching each to prevent the smuggling of diamonds to Axis forces. A precarious sense of order prevails during the day, as the book's main character, the policeman Scobie, tends to both war-related matters and local law enforcement. But underneath the blank smiling face of a native (or an Englishman) stirs something sinister, which emerges under the cover of darkness in the form of illicit transactions, plots of intrigue, and bloody crimes committed on the wharf.

We are, of course, not only in West Africa, but the familiar territory of Graham Greene. And, true to form, the town is not just a far-flung colonial outpost, but the battlefield of a man's soul. The Nazis, the diamond smuggling, a war that killed millions -- these serve as a background for Scobie's struggle, which stems from that most commonplace of difficulties: an unhappy marriage.

Scobie is a good man. He does not lie, he does not cheat, and he strives to do the least amount of harm. He is, like Greene, a converted Catholic. Like any good man with a modicum of power he is weighed down by a sense of responsibility, for the orderly upkeep of the town, the well-being of his servants, and, above all, the happiness of his poor, suffering wife, the object of mockery described in the passage above. And, like any good Catholic, he blames himself for her misery, for keeping her in this stifling town for fifteen long years, amidst fatuous expatriates who are determined to preserve the etiquette of the clubs and boarding schools of their homeland.

Scobie's crisis begins when he falls for another woman, a young widow whom he pities as much as his wife. This sets off a series of events in which the good man, little by little, succumbs to the evil that is everywhere around him, and to which so far he has been immune. It is an old story, but what sets this one apart is the cause of Scobie's downfall, which is not the classic temptation of sin, but Scobie's drive to be good. It is the religion he makes of his wife, who embodies his vow to be a better man, and the sin for which he must atone. But she does not want his sacrifice, and yearns to escape his overbearing pity, which mirrors the conundrum that Scobie himself confronts as he grapples with God: who, in the end, shoulders the cross? The one martyred, or the one for whom the sacrifice was made?

The Rabbi of Lud - Stanley Elkin

As a rabbi, I'm a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferance and lenities--all their official documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters' knacks, the oilers' and operators' known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.
-pg 98

 As a writer, Stanley Elkin's a sucker for jargon, for the vocabulary of vocation, all the catchphrases and customary utterances that are found in every profession, be it disc-jockeying, franchising, shit-shoveling, God-fearing, or, in this case, this book's particular obsession, the burying of Jewish dead. The speaker in the above passage is Jerry Goldkorn, the puppet through which Elkin's voice moves like that first, animating Word, the not-rabbi rabbi of the not-town of Lud, a community buried in a vast Jewish graveyard in New Jersey, which consists primarily of an ever-growing population of dead people and the few residents and businesses required to service the needs of the recently deceased. As far as being a rabbi goes, Goldkorn is sub-par, his calling to the service of God more an accident than some conscious decision; his Hebrew is so bad, his grasp of ritual and custom so tenuous, that to become ordained he was forced to go to an offshore yeshiva on a small atoll in the Maldives. The plot, such as it is, centers around Goldkorn's insistence on living in Lud and his daughter Connie's insistence that they leave. He likes the life; it's easy, he makes decent money, he has few responsibilities. She hates the life; she has no friends, the surrounding grave haunt her dreams. When she demands that the family leave the place and Goldkorn insists that they stay, Connie fabricates a silly story that rocks the community with outrage, and then she runs away. The Rabbi of Lud then enters a crisis of his curious, failed faith, examines his motivations for shying away from the world in a city of graves, and, in the end, the family, once again reunited, decides to stay.

There isn't much about the story that moves, per se. In this, it is perhaps one of Elkin's weakest books. All of his stories are animated by his distinctive voice; in the weaker ones every character seems infected by the mind of Stanley Elkin--they all speak the same way. For lovers of dramatic arc and emotional denouement, probably fifty percent of his books will rub them the wrong way. But that voice! It deserves reverence; listening to it as it infects your inner ear, like some virus, like, as in The Living End, the sweet impregnating song of God, is like entering a mind that has a vocabulary that multiplies the reader's by fifty times. And sometimes it's enough. But here, as in some of his other books, it's not. Despite the fact that Elkin has produced books moved solely by language and succeeded, where gimmicks and gags are piled up and pushed forward by an engine of stellar prose, some of his books end up as failures, too. The failures end up leaving the reader flat, wondering what, after the laughs, after all the fun, the point of it all was; whereas the successes leave the reader agog at the possibilities of language, how it can create and sustain a convincingly absurd world and deliver a hefty dose of pathos in the process. George Mills, perhaps his best book, which shares many of the themes of The Rabbi of Lud (and some some similarities of structure), is an example of a much better story, chock full with gags and gimmicks and wildly inventive narrative twists and turns, and it also has the benefit of having a level of language that is rarely equaled and perhaps never surpassed. This book, in comparison, seems a second-rate effort. But, keep in mind, second rate for someone who is undeniably a master.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

"...and down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad."

The story of Thomas Sutpen, who one day in 1833 appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, "on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine"; who by mysterious means secures from an Indian the best land in the county, and proceeds with unflagging fury, with the assistance of a pack of wild slaves clothed in nothing but caked mud, to construct the grim mansion that serves as the centerpiece of the plantation known as Sutpen's Hundred; who by the same indomitable will wins the hand of Ellen Coldfield, with whom he has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith; and who, by carrying and disseminating the sin of slavery, wreaks destruction on his family and himself, and curses the descendants of Yoknapatawpha.

Sutpen's motivation, the reason behind his unflagging fury, is one of the great mysteries of the novel. The story's narrators, perpetually astonished, and perhaps not unlike Faulkner himself, are driven by one question: Why? It is one of Absalom's greatest literary legacies, how the legend of Sutpen is invented and reinvented by different narrators as they strive to find that kernel of truth which will explain the inexplicable. And it is not only the tale of Sutpen that is told and retold, but that of Judith and Henry; Ellen and her sister Rosa; Sutpen's half-black child Clytie; and Charles Bon, the young man from New Orleans who has a mind to marry Judith. By telling their stories over and again, in circular iterations, Faulkner is not merely trying to achieve a Rashomon-like effect of different perspectives. Rather, his characters become as large as an Agamemnon or Persephone, mythic figures who cast their shadow over all storytelling, and who change depending on the storyteller.

Reviewers often describe books as "triumphs," which has always mystified me (a triumph over whom? over what?). But Absalom truly feels like a triumph, the triumph of willing something to life that resists it, as Faulkner pursues his quarry with the same indomitable determination that spurs his main character. To put it crudely, he starts big and he stays big, and it is a joy (a joy verging on despair) to see him pull it off, to read 400 pages of prose that never lets up in intensity, that barrels forward with relentless venom and beauty.

And even in the book's few moments of repose, the music of his writing is always there, that wonderful music of the inner ear: "He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking..."

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.