Character Sketches from The Enormous Room

Why am I starting all these reviews with the caveat: "it's good, but it's not picaresque?" And so it goes with e.e. cummings' The Enormous Room, an autobiographical novel (in fact, his only novel) that captures the characters and insights from his time as a "prisoner" of the French government during World War 1. Cummings wants to convey the loose of all sense of time while imprisoned and so his chapters are structured around the other men who are arrested and sent to the triage center. Basically, he depicts them in a Hogans' Heroes type of tale. None of the men remain etched in the reader's mind: they are streaming humanity, as innocent as Cummings, just as noble and just as confused. The absurdity of their arrests is a highly satirized indictment on the paranoia of the French regime. Cummings works hard at not being defeated at his senseless, crime-less detention and only admits to any sign of nervous breakdown once his release is secured.

Towards the end of the book, at the conclusion of each chapter, the more familiar Cummings emerges. He digests the preceding events and summarizes them poetically, with the cadence and mixed images that later were his hallmark.

A value to read for history of authors perspective, but nothing to add to this year's resolution list.

Lost Childhood. Take Two

The Path to the Spiders' Nests, by Italo Calvino, is another story like Kosinski's The Painted Bird, that traces the experiences of an abandoned child during World War II. However, unlike the boy in The Painted Bird, Pin is not wandering among peasants and destroyed farms; he is playing being grown up, hanging out in taverns, ending up in prison and trying to join the Red Brigade fighters. But he is still a child, noticing butterflies, spiders, and forests full of rhododendron.

This Calvino's first novel and my first reading by this author. Again, I was expecting something different. Some reviews have likened this book to South American magical realism but I find only a weak comparison, probably because of the lack of eccentric, extended family members. Pin's bravado comes across more like gangsta wannabes. His lost innocence makes such bravado bittersweet.

Far more interesting than the story itself is the preface written by Calvino for the 1964 version. It is like reading Eggers' introduction to A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius. Calvino writes about the times and about writing. The only parts of the book that I marked as resonating were from the preface:

"What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Every life-experience, in order to be interpreted properly, evokes certain things you have read and blends into them ..." and "Perhaps, in the end, it is only your first book that counts, perhaps you should only write that one and stop; you only make the great leap that one time, the opportunity to express your real self happens only onec, what you have to say inside you is either said at that point or never more ..." and what struck me the most, "There is another point: for those who start writing after one of those experiences that leave you with 'so many things to say' 9the war in this, and so many other cases), the first book instantly becomes a barrier between you and that experience, it severs the links that bind you to those facts, destroys your precious horde of memories - a horde in a sense that it would have become a reserve on which to draw permanently if you had been patient enough to husband it ..."

That defining moment in each author's life, those events that make him or her tell a tale that resounds, that concept scares me, yet explains underlying styles and themes that characterise Allende, Boyle, Irving, heck even Dickens.

I am straying ... is Nest picaresque? A bit. Definitely, a naive protagonist with huge misunderstanding of what dangers and bizarre events are happening around him. Pin's quest is normalcy and maturity, both of which are unfulfilled at the story's end. Connecting with Cousin implies that Pin is still on a path that is not enlightened. Perhaps accurately mirroring young Calvino's personal conflicts in his early 20s.

Maybe the Earth is Flat Because the Air Got Out When the Economy Was Punctured

This is like reading Freidman through the eyes of Jonathan Swift. X Out of Wonderland, by David Allan Cates literally takes less than a couple hours to read: a novella of 141 pages printed on 5x8 inch pages. And the story moves quickly too.

X is an unnamed Joe the Plumber and Wonderland obviously the good ol' US of A. X personifies the precarious hold middle class Americans have on financial security. One good tornado destroys his house; he loses his job; he falls into low paying manual labor; he meets other dislocated people. His quest is for gainful employment as he travels the globe and keeps looking for and encountering C, almost a dominatrix corporate opportunistic female, the lady in pink lame, and the crippled young artist. Cates style is arch-satiric, cleverly spinning consumerism platitudes into cosmic forces that lays all the characters low.

Maybe I should revisit this review after I read Candide (to which this book is compared on the back cover), because it hits only half of my picaresque elements, especially weak in the enlightenment denouement department. Nonetheless, an entertaining read, more palatable in its style than other diatribes against international/global economic benefit arguments.

You Never Know What You'll Find in a Tin of Chaw

I'll say one thing for this eclectic list of 2010, it's directing me to read authors and subjects I would not otherwise lift off a library or bookstore shelf. Such is Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky? by Baxter Black. Before going further, though, this is once again not a picaresque novel. It is another buddy story with lots of miles covered going from one professional rodeo to the next. Link and Cody are likable cowboys and their dogged attempts to stay on the back of a bucking bull for eight seconds are not as predictable as one might expect. Black writes of a camaraderie among the competitors, as they tell each other about the quirks and threats of the animals. Danger lurks only when Texan big businessmen look to win gambling bets by kidnapping Link at the year end competition in Oklahoma City.

Black is notable as the dean of the cowboy poets, who knew? And he has various gimmicks in the development of the story that are outright charming as well as clever. He interrupts the story every now and then to "talk" directly to the reader about what might come next and how he has gone about constructing the tale. I especially liked Pinto Calhoon, the genie/guardian angel who lives in a can of Copenhagen, speaks in rhymed couplets, and who has a prior history of not really helping those to whom he granted wishes, such as the likes of Ted Turner, Mario Puzo, Gary Hart, John DeLorean and John Erlichman. With such a history of failures, Link thinks Pinto is due for a change of luck and will help him win the finals.

So, I guess there are some picaresque elements in here: a true blue traveling buddy, daring escapes, and naive, a goodhearted protagonist on a quest. All in all, a wholesome humorous book about the contemporary West, the kind of book high school English teachers should put on summer reading lists (that is, completely devoid of political correctedness and social liberalism).

Warped Speed: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter Thompson, like TC Boyle, is one of the authors whose persona put me off reading their books. Maybe it was the manifestation of the old Catholic warning of near occasions of sin -- expecting the content to need a Legion of Decency rating. But, of course, now that I "a-tempted" TC, I avidly read anything he puts on paper. Is it the same for me with Thompson? Alas, no.

However, I liked F&L/LV more than I ever expected. Thompson's sense of satire remains after all his other senses are obliterated by mind-altering substances. It is way at the other end of the drug world spectrum from Breakfast in Babylon: here, there is no desperation to get the money to pay for the next hit and the characters live in grand hotel suites, not abandoned buildings. Thompson has even less interest in supporting characters than does Martin. He/Duke is center stage and all is viewed through his over-dilated eyes. The hitchhiker and the girl picked up by his attorney on the plane are just targets for Duke's satiric barbs, too stunned (or stoned) to engage in banter.

The only other character of note is Duke's Samoan attorney who rather than being an insightful Sancho Panza, is more like a gym weight spotter, watching Duke consume vast quantities of illegal substances, encouraging him to do more. Any dialogue is superficial.

F&L/LV is not picaresque. I am beginning to believe that whomever coded the books I put on the 2010 list as this genre decided that any book with escapades involving booze, sex, drugs, and arrests qualified. It is a memoir, a You Tube like short clip of a trip to Nevada, perhaps an advertisement for "what happens in Vegas, etc." But the real trip and all the events take place in Duke's head. Despite his assignments, it appears that he never actually covers nor submits articles for the motorcycle race or police conference. Rather these externals only become anchors for the story, to place it in time and location.

The pace of the short story moves along at hyper-speed (as opposed to the lethargic tempo of Breakfast in Babylon). Thompson is an author that can convey that rush, but it is a race to the last page without an ending.

Unlisted: The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston

After discovering that John Hart's The Last Child was nominated for an Edgar for 2009, I tracked down the list of other nominees and found The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death. Not only is it just as good if not better than TLC, it is picaresque! Not advertised as such, but hits all ten of my key elements. And maybe more entertainingly than TC Boyle’s Budding Prospects.

Like BP, The Mystic Art is set in California but more contemporaneously. Growing marijuana sounds more intentional than ending up cleaning violent crime scenes. Web, the main character, is vegetating after quitting his job has a grammar school teacher. He is living off an old friend, Chev, and scrounging money from his aging New Age mother, who sends him checks in dollar amounts in a numeric sequence, and his dissipate father, a former film writer. He ends up being offered a job to clean up the physical evidence of death once the police conclude a crime scene investigation.

If this scenario and supporting characters seem odd enough, complications pile on when Web is seduced by the daughter of a man who is a smuggler about to be raided and who commits suicide. The intrigue and farce of her brother trying to finance his films by taking over offloading two trucks of high-jacked almonds (almonds!) is absurd, but plausible. Compounding that comedy is the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of crime scene cleanup, an unregulated cut throat (ooh, bad pun, my bad) industry dependent on referrals from police detectives.

Chev, who runs a tattoo business, seems ancillary until the plot reveals his family’s tragic connection to Web’s. Web’s disengagement from life is revealed to have been caused by a drive-by gang shooting that left him with PTSD. He is sincere if misguided in trying to help Soledad and Jaime, but in the end figures out a way to make things come out right … even with some “money for nothin’” and the questionable disappearance of some dangerous dudes. And yet, it is a funny, roguish adventure. A ten out of ten.

He’s Not Listed in the Index of Patron Saints – Saint Jack

Paul Theroux’ 1973 novel, Saint Jack is about an exiled American who works selling things to ships in Singapore but who is really a pimp. Jack’s biggest success in his life-long goal to be rich and leisured is when he is approached by an agent of the US government to set up an exclusive brothel for soldiers on R&R from the War in Viet Nam. Prior to that, he was simply a hustler and regular drinking buddy of exiled Englishmen. The same agent offers him a second “job” of taking incriminating photographs of a Major General who allegedly comes to Singapore to abuse women. Jack takes the assignment but finds his redemption in discovering that the General engages in less sordid escapes.

Maybe under a different author this story could align better as picaresque. It does not meet my criteria at all. Jack Fiori "Flowers" is not innocent, despite his regarding his procuring as a saintly calling; he is not on a quest, but simply aging into wisdom; and while he is kidnapped and tattooed (vaguely reminiscent of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo we read this month for book club), he is not threatened, rather humiliated temporarily until he can have the Chinese character slurs inked over, at which point they become medals of honor and part of his fame.

The atmosphere of Singapore seems quaintly accommodating until Jack sees it succumb to more violent, exhibitionist kinds of sex in the mid-60s. The government at the time had not become the "caning for chewing gum" regime it is now and Jack settles back into its comfort and routine at the book’s conclusion. Not just that ending, but the entire progress of the story, is too routine and does not jump into the reader’s memory or provoke admiration for a bumbling rascal like a good picaro does.

The Worst Picaresque So Far This Year: Breakfast in Babylon

After a year of only American books, I am looking forward to reading novels set in other countries. Kosinsky, Allende, and even "Avatar" have written stories sent respectively in eastern Europe, South America and India that harken back to the importance of setting as influencing the advancement and outcome of a plot. So I was then off, I thought, to Ireland with Emer Martin having Breakfast in Babylon.

Wrong, she never sets foot on the old sod. In fact her main character Isolt is hardly conscious of where her feet are, as she staggers stoned and drunk through Europe with the most degenerate druggies imaginable. For days now I have struggled with trying to come up with a list of adjectives that would tell just how miserable her life and "friends" are. I've decided not to bother ... and don't bother reading it.

The Best Picaresque So Far This Year: Eva Luna

Full disclosure: Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors -- although I had only read Aphrodite and My Invented Country before venturing into her story of a “picara” named Eva Luna. Eva, like the boy in The Painted Bird, loses her parents when very young and her adventures arise in a mysterious world where she is either passed along to new households full of odd, sometimes threatening, but more often colorful people, or runs away to new predicaments..

Because she starts her journey so young and before she could attend school, her understanding of what happens to her is influenced by folklore, myths and dreams. This element of a picaresque story merges naturally with Allende’s style of magical realism – the amalgamation of supernatural elements and realistic themes – a style also employed by other South American authors.This style uses images that are highly visible and uniquely absurd, but not frightening: a house full of coffins; the lady of the house wig resembling a dying fox; the religious processions carry statues to end both droughts and deluges. Magical realism softens the physical flaws and psychological scars of the story’s characters who might have been more grotesque and less human in other roguish adventures: Raid’s hair lip; Rolfe’s child abuse; Melesio’s transsexuality.

Allende writes a timeless, placeless story. The landscape has both Andes-like mountains and Venezuelan petroleum. It’s political turmoil could take place in any South or Central American country. Because so much of the action takes place in remote areas, where the populations remain primitive and unaware of current events, it could have occurred anytime; it is anchored only in references to rocket launches and Fidel Castro.

Eva’s placement as a servant is not necessarily exploitative and is not depicted as something in itself as unnatural. Although she does not have the equivalent of a Sancho Panza accompanying her through her escapades, she has guiding adults like her abula Elivira, the Yugoslavian artist, and La Senora who contribute to her education in language, culture and womanhood. Her encounters with men, even when they could be threatening, are tempered with insights.

Eva’s quest is to become a writer, like Isabel’s, and towards the end of the book, Eva is writing the story just recounted. Isabel speaks through Eva at this point with her theories of storytelling and the absence of strict chronology. Isabel also speaks through Eva in her recollection of preparing food to enhance romance and her reverence of familial eccentricities.

Allende’s life lends itself readily to this genre.