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Second Look: Jennifer Egan's Look At Me

I’d meant to set aside Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me while I read some other, highly regarded books. But I kept coming back to it, because on almost every page there was something in the prose that rewarded my attention. A woman acting in a film, set in a corn field as makeup is applied to her face: 

With my eyes shut, sounds seemed to magnify. rain tapping the corn, leaves sliding wetly, a distant grinding of thunder. I heard Thomas yelling to Speak No Evil as they tested the boom.  “We’re getting static from the wind.” All of it broke, scattered the way children’s voices churn and shred in a playground, folding into the wet leaves , the sour animal smell of earth.  My scalp tightened, prickling over my skull.

Compared to this Junot Diaz’s prose seemed bombastic; John Updike’s, clotted; and the vast majority of writing seems unobservant. “The way children’s voices churn and shred in a playground.”  That is a precise observation I’ve never heard made before. The verbs, both engine and epiphany, are worrthy of Updike at his best.   

Jennifer Egan Attacks A Big Mac

I was first struck by the factual lavishness of Jennifer Egan’s  Look at Me.  She knows the names of every bit of jewelry in a rich provincial woman’s dresser, of skateboarding moves, of academic papers about industrialization, of the contents of a model’s purse. 

But the real lesson to me as a writer is how she marinates those facts in her imagination. 

A man who might be a terrorist–the foreign kind, not the bubbas who murdered in Oklahoma City–eats a Big Mac: 

He couldn’t taste anything at first, could only think that it would never go down, he would choke to death on this gray sweetness, dry and sticky; he tried to swallow, his throat straining, seizing to push the clotted mass down its slender duct. Finally the lump evacuated his mouth with a tearing sensation, eased into his throat like a rat moving though a snake. He ate a French fry, breathing hard, sweat on his face, then shoved the second half of Big Mac into his mouth, loosening its airless compression with a slug of Coca Cola, his body braced for the surge of rage that would galvanize his dead insides when this affront reached them, an explosion that would shove it all back up. But nothing happened. He sat there nibbling French fries, watching light trucks big as houses slip past on Alpine, the Walther inert at his ankle, feeling the lump of food dissolve and become part of him, its cells mingling with his own cells, dividing to make new cells–the cells of a person who had eaten at McDonald’s. Then he crumpled the rest of his meal into the foil, a shiny McDonald’s wad, pushed it through the plastic slot of the garbage bin and stood beside it, unsure what to do next.

Compare that to the former adulterers who enter the same McDonald's a few pages later. 

The one thing that bothers me–as a consumer, as someone who feels their half-articulated wants are the ultimate criterion of all worth–about Look at Me is what feels like Egan’s occasional lack of enthusiasm for her own characters.  The prose sometimes reads like she snapped on latex gloves before sitting down to write. But she is also a poet of the dismal, the downside, the second thought, the qualification, the clinically honest report, the mug shot.

Chip Kidd's The Learners: I Know, It's Just A Damn Cover, But What A Cover

I keep looking at the cover of Chip Kidd's The Learners: appreciating the thwock! of the Chris Ware line art; the nostalgic frisson of the image printed right on the cover; the cleverness of the angled, partial book jacket which obscures the character’s expression (and which thus gives the cover a punchline); the way the angled jacket invokes x-acto blades and, I just realized, Batman hideouts; the way the type on the jacket suggests the image it hides. This is the joy of seeing an object which has been completely thought through by a gifted practitioner. There are no inefficiencies here, no sputter of compromise, no smear of laziness. Maybe I just know too much about the design process to know how exceptional this is. 

Who Do You Love?

It just occurred to me, while reading Chip Kidd’s The Learners, that there's a great, obvious question to ask about a novel and that it has never occurred to me to ask it: what does it love?  Chip Kidd’s prose become alive–detailed, nuanced, surprising–when he writes about what he loves: the stylishness of 1961 and the pleasures of pre-digital graphic design.  And when I asked what does The Stone Gods love, the answer wasn’t anything as hard to grasp as “the earth.” It’s the stupid dinosaurs. Her prose wakes up when she writes about them. 

Her Preach Exceeds Her Grasp? Notes On The Politics In Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

I read the Stone Gods several weeks ago, but I’ve made notes that have coalesced into absolutely nothing since then. In lieu of a coherent essay, blurtings numbered for your convenience:   

1. Maybe I dislike Winterson’s politics because they are not my politics.

Her ideal appears to be an anarchist lesbian collective. I describe my politics as moderate. What that boils down to is this:  I think liberals underestimate how responsible business is for our prosperity and I think conservatives underestimate how responsible government is for our security. It’s a politics rife with howevers. I’m not interested in arguing those points right now, although this is a blog and if you want to beat me up in the comments go ahead.

2. Fiction gets facts wrong.

The Stone Gods is political in that it takes an anti-global warming position and, broadly, advocates a policy. (Stop it.) Policies are built on facts. Fiction is ill-suited to a discussion of facts because, well, it’s fiction and it’s inherently ironic: there is always some wiggle room between the writer and the narrating voice. Wiggle room, opacity, obliqueness—They blur facts; they destabilize answers. The book isn't without political subtlety: it acknowledges that one of the problems with global warming is that some of it is caused by developing countries and one of the solutions might be to curb their development.

3.  Politics is melodrama. 

Most politics—and by politics I mean the things that ricochet around in our heads and in casual conversation and in blogs–is melodrama. It’s Yankees-Red Sox, with even more self-righteousness. And the pleasures of melodrama are the pleasures of hatred. 

4. Fiction thrives on fucked-up protagonists. 

Cheri Johnson once told me that the best fiction creates a character you love and then makes them do something you hate. I don’t think fiction needs to always push characters that hard, but somebody’s precious soul needs to be compromised, strained, confused, clueless, exposed, self-sabotaging, vulnerable, conflicted, something.   

5. So is there such a thing as good political fiction? 

I think so. I love fiction that takes the broth politics has uncomfortably heated and plops a character in it. In 1984, the clocks are striking 13 and Winston Smith has to deal with it; the world of The Road is a microwaved anarchy–do you kill the man approaching you?   

Speculative fiction can also take our choices and push them. One of the pleasures of the Stone Gods is a future, or maybe a past, where cosmetic surgery has met genetic coding to create “age fixing.” Winterson explores how weird this could get. But my favorite moment is when our hero, who is opposed to age fixing, glimpses the face of an actual old woman and it sickens her.      

There’s also a kind of political narrative that shows how flawed people get good things done. I loved Charlie Wilson’s War but its politics are more or less mine.    

6. The things I could be missing

The flawed protagonist could be the earth.  The flawed protagonist could be humanity. 

There may be no policy recommendations. Global warming may be a tragedy, with humanity as Hamlet.

The only things we can be counted on to recycle are our mistakes.

Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (I): Life. Sentences.

I have long maintained–perhaps stubbornly, perhaps stupidly–that  the best fiction is not transparent but iridescent. I love Jeannette Winterson, with many many qualifications, because she writes sentences such as the following: “The science never gets as far as the strangeness.” Her sentences are vivid, balanced, and lucid. They refresh the world they describe. If you can write sentences like that, you can do a whole bunch of other things wrong.

Tentative Notes on Charles Baxter

It is hard to write about former teachers without it seeming like you’re sucking up. I should note that Charles Baxter is a former teacher of mine and that I am immensely grateful to him for many reasons. Most pertinently, he insisted that every piece of fiction is a distinctive solution to a distinctive problem and that the duty to understand the writer’s intentions precedes the right to opine about the writer’s work.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for the metafictional twist in The Soul Thief–a book partly written in a third person with the opacity and instability of first person–but I think I’ve sussed it out: The Soul Thief is about sabotage and the twist is a kind of sabotage. 

(I'm still thinking about his decision to relay the pivotal events of the story in a summarized retrospect.)

Baxter’s acrobatic structures–First Light, my favorite, proceeds backwards–can distract from his other great strength: prose which surprises sentence by sentence.

Almost at random, this description of LAX: 

My fellow passengers trudged out of the plane, blinking like moles exposed to the sunshine. The demon-child I had entertained slept, now, in his mother’s backpack. One woman, clearly, a tourist, pulled her luggage-slop (beach bag, reticule, cosmetics kit) out of the overhead bin and staggered toward the exit. As soon as she reached the gate, she uttered a dissapointed “huh?” at the ceiling.

Then a few sentences later: 

“In every interior nook and cranny, TV sets, hanging like huge spiders from the ceiling, boomed down disinformation from the Airport Channel. You stumble toward your luggage.”

Note the small daring onomatopoeic accuracy of “luggage slop”; the freighted verbs “trudged” and “stumble”; the hint of the narrator’s campus radical past in “disinformation”; the rightness of the spiders metaphor, the weird 180 of the mole metaphor (they are emerging from the sky). 

No Country for Old Men, Young Men, Women, Dogs, Or Most Microbes

You probably know the story of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road —a man and a boy wandering through a post-apocalyptic America, although “post-apocalyptic” is a little sunny. The world is decimated, toxic, post-altruistic, subhuman, subcanine,  quasi-Martian, and perhaps post-biological.   

Fortunately, McCarthy pins this world down with a startlingly good, audacious style, which is all the better for not being original. This is not to say that McCarthy doesn’t have his own thoughts, many of them brilliant. But he doesn’t really have his own sound or slant of prose. Reading The Road  is like reading Hemingway, the Bible, and Shakespeare and imitating those three styles is, I’d contend, superior to coming up with your own.   

I hear Hemingway in the laconic dialog, affectless descriptions linked with “and” and the image of a trout stream as a stand-in for all that is good. (You could do worse.)

The Bible whispers in sentences such as “She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”

And Shakespeare lives in the collisions of adjective and noun: “autistic cities,”   “the intestate earth.”

Jon Spayde's How to Believe

My friend Jon Spayde's book How To Believe, in which he interviews thirty-four believers about their faith goes on sale Tuesday.  The book is a conversation, which he continues here. 

This much madness is too much sorrow: Notes on Swallow the Ocean

I picked up Swallow the Ocean by my fellow MFA Laura M. Flynn at the Borders in San Diego.

After a preface which suggests the trouble to come, the book begins with a delicately observed evocation of childhood happiness. If you’re an impatient reader, chill: there will be plenty of drama soon.  A book which skipped the happiness would have been more gripping, but cheaply so. In the end, this memoir, which describes her childhood with her paranoid schizophrenic mother, caused me to fight back tears. 

Swallow the Ocean is also a book which takes both the moral and artistic challenges of memoir seriously and meets them successfully. To write a memoir is to judge others on the basis of our fallible and self-serving memories and the people we write about often have no rebuttal. This demands great scrupulousness. The book is both unflinching and forgiving. In cases where her memory is sketchy, Flynn simply asks her sisters and notes their differences.  I'm not sure why more memoirists don't do this.   

The artistic challenge of memoir is its necessarily double vision, which also seems nicely navigated here: She captures the lived sensibility of a child with the mature perspective of an adult. Frankly, the book kicked my ass a little bit.  I hope that I can write about baseball cards and tabletop hockey games the way she writes about dolls. 

I have tried to write about the role sugar played in my childhood, so I especially admire the treatment of it here.  I’ll quote a paragraph about Twinkies. When her mother left the house, Laura and her sisters would binge on banned sugar. She had already described fruit pies with a kind of hyperrealism, so you noted their serrations and heft:   

A Twinkie was the opposite of a fruit pie: its weightlessness was what made it desirable. Like all items of spun sugar–marshmallows, cotton candy–what was desirable in a Twinkie was its emptiness. Perfect and uniform in a way only a machine could achieve, only a child could love. Twinkies were all artifice and air. I bit in, Foamy cake. White fluff. There was a clarity to these foods, a reassuring neatness. Nothing murky, crunchy or unknown.