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.

Eh -- I Don't Need to Snag Smith's Signature

Score The Autograph Man as either a six or a seven based on the Slackers' ten elements of a picaresque novel. Zadie Smith's second novel is set in London, recounting the life of Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese Jew, and his childhood friends as the age (I won't say as they mature, especially Alex/the naive protagonist) from teens to early 30s. At a wrestling match, Alex meets Joseph who is an avid autograph hound. Although Joseph outgrows this hobby, it becomes Alex's consuming passion/quest, focused exclusively on a reclusive actress named Kitty Alexander whose autographs are non-existent and the subject of many forgeries. Alex's best friend/buddy Adam is an enabler who encourages Alex's drinking and drug habits and tolerates his wanderings/sex adventures with Boot and Honey, betraying his long-suffering, broken-hearted (with a pacemaker) girlfriend Esther. Many bizarre characters populate the novel both from the world of arcana buyers and sellers to a dwarf rabbi (what's with all these dwarfs ... thought I finished them in the Tin Drum!).

Those picaresque elements that are not as apparent or strong revolve around that portion of the plot when Alex meets Kitty, secures her memorabilia for sale, and then profits from a premature announcement of her death. There is no real danger or near escapes here: only opportunities for Alex to learn more about real life. Similarly, there is neither a strong development of his misunderstanding events nor an eventual enlightenment. Alex and Esther argue yet again, Alex perfunctorily recites Kaddish for his dead Chinese father, and Kitty remains in London playing dead. But Smith has constructed the story to foretell such a soft landing, strewing conversations with observations that life is not like a movie and endings aren't neatly sewn up. One of her more clever literary devices is the use of the "International Gesture" as a way to make written dialogue more visual like overhead conversations on the street. OK: now visualize this: my left shoulder curling towards my chest, my head inclining towards my shoulder, in the international gesture of a shrug, the "eh" as my nonverbal book review.

Life's Musical Score

The 2010 list is slow going. I have not really found that many books that I want to gobble up and race through. Most have been efforts and fall short of the ten picaresque elements. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is picaresque but is also 589 pages long and has consumed weeks of my reading time.

What a complex, ever-echoing story this is. A thorough review itself could run dozens of pages. Theme builds upon theme, character upon character. The only way I can curtail my enthusiastic review from being a thesis is to focus exclusively on my picaresque identifiers. I have been thinking about what to write for a couple of days, and only in the last day or so, did I conclude it was picaresque. Perhaps the clincher was a sentence from Wiki that I ran across: "The Tin Drum is a picaresque novel ... an example of bildungsroman tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations, and relationships from boyhood to manhood." With that criteria, some of my previous reviews bear revisiting.

Similar to The Painted Bird's protagonist, Oskar is a child in Poland just before the outbreak of World War II. His quest is an attempt to reconcile the diametrically opposed forces in his life: religion, parentage, geography, art, politics, employment. He is a born old dwarf child. One is never sure whether he is controlling his destiny or interpreting it from an immature vantage. He believes he controls his height; he can determine his father and become a father to his brother; he can create destruction with his voice and his drum and force the course of history, killing friend and foe. So obviously score highly in the misunderstanding of events element.

Oskar really doesn't have a quest-buddy. Several people share his adventures at different points of time; only his drums stay with him through thick and thin. There are bizarre characters galore. In fact, Grass exaggerates all, villains and family alike. Certainly there is near escapes from the war, disease, and criminals. Sex is naive, mythical, and ever-present.

Written as a retrospective of his life at age 30 (close to Grass' age when the book was published) Oskar has reached no denouement. All he can acknowledge is he is faced with more choices, more need to conform. Like his home town, the free city of Danzig, now Gdansk, Oskar seems to remain flexible to change in an instant as circumstances and events demand.

Ragtag Rejects, Not Rogues

OK this is clever. Rather than having a single person go on a quest for the impossible, Philip Roth writes of an entire baseball team in pursuit of a winning season. Get a sense this isn't 100% picaresque yet? It is close, I'll admit that. The players on the team, the manager, nay, even the owner seem naive. Because it is the summer of 1943 and their home field has been redeployed as a point of departure for soldiers heading off to WWII, the Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey consist of the best left uncalled to service: a dwarf, a catcher with one leg, a right fielder with one arm, a teenager and an assortment of retirees. Yes, the characters are bizarre and the quest to finish above the cellar insurmountable. In addition to the traditional sports fetishes and charms, Roth has the team's success dependent on a new formula of Wheaties (here are the elements of bizarre and naive).

However, it is all so visibly contrived. Roth assumes the persona of the narrator, Word Smith, a sports writer who writes a 45 page prologue that is nothing but an apologia. Again in the epilogue, he plays the martyred author whose novel is rejected untold times as unpublishable (an accurate insight or false bravado). There are plenty of literary references that in the hands of TC Boyle would have been a seamless marvel but here come across as blatant bragging, like the teenage Jewish "genius" son of the owner of an opposing team.

The writing style is a combination of the compulsion of baseball statistics and hack alliteration. The characters are presented in a string of vignettes, that only goes to reinforce the Ruppert Mundys lack of cohesion. Since the only other Roth I ever read was Portnoy's Complaint (and vowed after that never to read another), this book was better than that first exposure but The Great American Novel it ain't.

C'Est Qui Ton Pere

That's the name of a horse I've been following over the winter meet, and winning a few bucks on. But it also is an appropriate title for this review of Childhood by Andre Alexis, a Canadian author from Trinidad, who lapses into French dialog at many points in this tale of Thomas MacMillan who recalls growing up not knowing who his father is.

Just to be sure that my computer has not been possessed by rogue viruses that have corrupted my thesaurus, making picaresque mean anything but humorous, raucous, racy misdemeanors, I checked book reviews on the Net this morning. Nope, Amazon's top reprise calls this effort picaresque. Am I back in school miserably flunking a graduate course on the picaresque novel because I missed the first lecture and don't have a handle on its standard definition? Or am I, myself, on a quest -- incomprehensible, futile and insatiable -- to find a dozen or so novels that both entertain and mildly scandalize me?

If I had picked "stories about growing up" as the theme for 2010, Alexis employs several literary gimmicks to liven up his novel and most subtly advance themes of coming to terms with never quite understanding one's parents, nor for that matter, wanting to look too deeply into their personal/sexual lives, and of, nonetheless, becoming indelibly imprinted by the characteristics of those adults, so much so, they are apparent only to an observer who knows all the generation's traits and preferences. Alexis gives us enough of Thomas' personality to see the vestiges of his mother Katarina and her mentor Henry living on, if not genetically, than through strong behavioral modeling.

Not for All the Tea in China

Kyril Figlioli explicitly sets out to write a picaresque novel -- the extended title states this clearly: "All the Tea in China which tells how Carolus Mortdecai Van Cleef set out to seek his fortune in London Town; on the High Seas, in India, the treaty ports of China and even in darkest Africa; and how he found it predictably, in a place which has no longitude and precious little latitude."

His protagonist is a young man driven from his home in Holland to make his fortune selling his mother's Delft porcelains. Traveling to England, he befriends another merchant who gets him settled in a shop but who also inadvertently suggests that his china business could flourish if financed through the opium trade. So off to sea.

Okay ... theme set. Now is this a story written in the 19th or 20th Century? Imitation in not in this case high flattery. The book is so formulaic as to be as thin and tattered as a McCall's pattern in a house of six growing girls. Figilioi's introduction of picaresque elements is rote: the seduction of the captain's wife; the duel with the first mate; the encounter with cannibals in Africa. But this is no Mungo Park.

Figlioli writes of Africa: "A trek is like a long sea-voyage but dusty. The dangers are as many but of a different nature: there is little danger of drowning, for instance. The boredom is exactly similar, day follows day in an unchanging pattern, one loses count of time, and after many days on can only recall trivial incidents, small oases in a desert of dullness." An apt summary of the intrigue (or lack thereof) in the entire novel.

All the Tea in China is a prequel to Figlioli's Mortdecai's series of stories. I am not tempted to peruse them. Please, a contemporary picaresque!