Six out of Ten Beginning to Think Isn't Bad

I liked Meely LaBauve by Ken Wells. The obvious comparison is the one made on the back of the book calling Meely (Emile) the Cajun Huck Finn. And there are numerous parallels that make the story evocatively comforting: adventures on water, scraps with local constabularies, a first crush, truancy and absent parents. Wells also updates the story while showing things in the South are still festering with the same problems Twain depicted: racial tensions, poverty, dependency on the land.

Meely is small for his age and naive socially although quite grown-up in terms of being self-sufficient and moral. Wells portrays Meely's friends and neighbors a bit stereotypically, even the school room bullies are predictable. His depiction of the bayous and living off the food they provide are also standard. His best scenes are Meely's father going after the biggest alligator they have ever seen and Meely at the morgue.

I probably should read Huck Finn next to put Meely up against it picaresque element to element. Meely's story lacks a focused quest and therefore ultimate enlightenment. Normal or slightly dangerous boyhood growing up experiences are not enough for me to tag a novel picaresque.

Not so Chichi

If last year’s theme was about place, 2010 is provoking me to think I am reading time-dependent novels. It is making me think about another one of my long-held beliefs; namely, that great literature is timeless and the stories therein speak to future generations. My son recently emailed me an article written by a poli sci professor who requires his students to read the Classics and cull from them universals about conflict and human nature. I am reading to “hear something ring true.”

That didn’t happen with Gogol’s Dead Souls. Instead, it made me question whether my love for Dickens wasn’t preordained by the way I was taught English Lit in college: strict chronology, over five semesters. Maybe he just seemed the best when compared with all who wrote before him. So seems Gogol. Placing this banned book after Miller’s Tropic of Cancer – which itself now shocks much less – Dead Souls must have been censored because it debunked corrupt local dignitaries as well as satirically over-caricaturizing stock Russian landowners. Gogol as author enters the story to explain his choice of an anti-hero in Chichikov. In fact, Gogol often editorializes within the tale to explain his style and intent. The only pages that I dog-eared where those where he intrudes.

Rather than detailing my lack of knowledge about the history of Russian literature, I will only comment on Dead Souls as picaresque. If Gogol wanted this volume to be the first part of a larger story modeled on The Divine Comedy, it is expected that Chichikov experiences no enlightenment after his years of skirting the law. Certainly, the novel hits hard on parodying contemporary politics. His servants are not strong fellow travelers; his near escapes are accomplished by officials more rascal than he is. Chichikov’s quest is not noble or based on a simple misunderstanding of value – it is for the almighty kopek. The humor is buffoonish; where it might be subtle, too much time and upheaval has intervened.

I am feeling like Goldilocks: late 20^th Century selections on the list don’t seem to be universal enough; older novels are coming across as dated. Where is my perfect picaresque book?

Fear of Flying: Mr. Vertigo

OK, I cheated. I checked out a couple of reviews on Amazon to see if I was the only one who encountered a massive depressurization after the midpoint of flying through this story. Paul Auster has a wonderfully clever premise on a coming of age tale of a ragamuffin boy from St Louis who is sold by his uncle to a "promoter" who sees the potential in Walt for human flight. Set in Wichita, I was settling in to a comfortable reminiscences of The Charlatan from the 2009 States' list, wondering what it is about otherwise dreadful Kansas that makes it such a perfect setting for hucksters and con artists. Wonderfully drawn, if slightly stock characters populate Walt's pre-flight years: his mentor, Master Yehudi, Mother Sioux, and Aesop the mentally brilliant/physically deformed Black orphan he grows up with.

Walt and the story get off the ground more through his own efforts than through any real instruction from the Master. They begin a successful, financially profitable tour until hormones kick in and adolescence brings Walt painfully back to Earth, a would-be Icarcus who never even gets close to the lights on Broadway and big time of New York City. Once Walt stops levitating, the book falls flat as well. The most bizarre and dissonant section comes in Part III when as a young adult club owner on the fringes of criminal Chicago mobs, Walt decides to kill Dizzy Dean. There are early hints of Walt's love of the St. Louis Cardinals, but this tangent is completely out in left field.

The reader experiences vertigo: the story free falls into a mundane, earth-bound conclusion. Walt's review of his life has so many things in its ledger that human flight merits equal mention with mediocre military service, drudge work in a New Jersey bakery, and managing laundromats back in Kansas. Auster undergoes his own descent when he cannot sustain a soaring story. The clever simile becomes a gimmick.

Can It Be Picaresque If All's Well That Ends Well?

Hurray! Another book to race through: Nightwork by Irwin Shaw. Shaw's entry in Wikipedia only lists Nightwork under his array of works; it is not reviewed like his better known Rich Man, Poor Man and Evening in Byzantium. Not having read those two, I cannot say how Nightwork stacks up against them. (Comparing it to my last review, it pales against Tropic of Cancer, but it still is a better picaresque.)

The protagonist Douglas Grimes (hearken to crimes) is a night clerk in a seedy hotel in New York City in the early 1970s when a guest dies in front of room 602 and Grimes discovers a cardboard roll of $100 bills. He keeps the money and flies off to Europe with a ski club that is regularly waived through Swiss customs. After a mix-up of luggage, Grimes discovers his ill-gotten wealth is with another one of the people from the plane. He eventually traces the bag to Miles Fabian, an archetype resort gigolo/adventurer. He ends up "partnering" with Fabian and the quest to multiple the money begins: buying a lame thoroughbred in Paris, speculating in gold and land in the Alps; investing in Chianti in Italy; and eventually, opening up an art gallery on Long Island. All the while expecting the original owners of the found money to come after him seeking revenge and repayment.

Fabian's monologue midway through their escapades explains their motivations and the milieu in which they conspire to profit: "A long time ago I decided that the world was a place of infinite injustice. What have I seen and lived through? Wars in which millions of innocent perished, holocausts, droughts, failures of all kinds, corruption in high places, the enrichment of thieves, the geometric multiplication of victims. And nothing I could possibly do to alter or alleviate any of it. I am not a pain seeker or reformer, and even if I were, no conceivable good would come out of my suffering or preaching. So - my intention has always been to avoid joining the ranks of the victims. As far as I could ever see, the people who avoided being victims had at least one thing in common. Money." (A bit of Shaw leaking through here, after his run-in with the HUAC and his exile to Davos.)

There are plenty of adventures, unique but not parodied characters encountered across their travels, interesting female diversions -- but both men are charmed and the investments never fail and wealth accrues. At the story's end, the partnership is broken, Grimes is married and reconciled with one of his brothers, and financially set so that when the "bad guys" show up, it is anticlimactic to pay them off. Where is the enlightenment?

Portrait of an Artist as a Rogue

Drawing up the book lists for 2009 and 2010 has given me the chance to confront prejudices that I’ve toted around about certain authors and books probably for decades. I’ve already written about my avoidance to TC Boyle given the promotional pictures on the back of his books that seemed to present an occasion of sin to me. Other contemporary American authors also seemed verboten: Saul Bellow; any more of Philip Roth after complaining Portnoy. Similarly, maybe as a vestige of the Legion of Decency, I steered clear of Henry Miller, odd because in my mid-20s I devoured all of Anais Nin’s diaries.

I rapidly consumed Tropic of Cancer in a couple of days, yet at the same time, relishing entire pages of Miller’s images of Paris and literature. Parts reminded me of Breakfast in Babylon if only to contrast how squalor and hard times affect the main characters so differently. Maybe it's because his Parisians are not addicted en masse to illegal drugs and because he does occasionally manage to find a job. He describes being a newspaper proofreader thus: "This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degradation, I welcome now, as an invalid welcomes death. It's a negative reality, just like death -- a sort of heaven without pain and terror of dying. In this chthonian (on of my favorite words used often by my classics scholar son) world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation." What a perfect counterpoise for Miller's urge to create something of beauty and worth: "... as I ruminated, it began to grow clear to me, the mystery of ... pilgrimage, the flight which the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth, the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore."

Miller as a picaro has artistic tumult as his quest. His ruminations declaim the sterility and quashing of creativity found in a capitalist society. He values personal freedom and personal “morality” above economic, political or religious dictates. Again: "When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears."

My avoidance of ToC stemmed from associating it with Grove Press and all the sordid pornography it reputedly published. I don’t know anyone who has read ToC, basically because I was too embarrassed to ask. And there is plenty of sex in the novel. Sex is not couched in parody nor is it pejorative or gratuitous or extraneous to the plot. Women are not maligned; men are not drawn up as debauched. Sex is lust, therapy, an aperitif, the basis of all things human and inspirational. Sort of like Miller's Paris.

Maybe some day I'll come back to this review and score it higher on my picaresque scale, but I can't score it high enough on my "must read" list.