it's difficult grouping books together (and harder still to find snappy titles for the categories) - these are all modern "serious" writers from north america.
i'm not sure i can do justice to this book. i hope to read it again soon and maybe i can write something more intelligent then - i want to sort out the irony from the grim truth.
it is amusing, intelligent, fascinating. like all the books by de lillo that i've read, its main theme is america, and americans, but unlike mao ii or libra, it's gentle with its subjects. maybe the sympathetic tone is too seductive. as i said, i'll be reading it again soon...
another book by de lillo, and more thoughts about the society in which we live. in concentrating on historical (the last 50 years) america this feels more removed from my own life than, for example, white noise.
this is a wide ranging, complex book, worrying about love and betrayal, the threat of the bomb and the sense of community it created, and, dominantly, about consumerism, waste, and the cult of ownership.
i have two separate comments i want to make.
first, i was not completely happy with this book. none of the works i've read by de lillo has had a rollicking plot and this is by far the longest, which means that the final hundred pages feel a little more like a chore than they should. part of the blame must lie with the temporal structure - the story moves backwards in time. i guess a fair amount of work (to be honest, i have no idea at all - what am i doing sitting here writing about books like this, criticising them, when i could never write anything comparable?) must have been spent planning how the various threads from earlier in the book come together at the end, but some of the final knots - the shooting, in particular - seemed inadequate. on the other hand i may have missed some connections (were they the same balls - what about the man on the ship? - or was that, after all, the point?).
i should confess that another reason for my lack of enthusiasm is that de lillo doesn't pander as much to my racist preconceptions of modern america as in some of his earlier work. there's a certain cheesy aroma of feel-good italian-american boy/girl made goodness that niggles me. as he lost my sympathy (this was later in the book - the initial focus on trash and bombs was a solid fix) i became less trusting - if his description of the web, which is something i do know, is that far off the mark, then should i buy his depiction of a graffiti artist?
but writing this, i feel guilty (i can picture myself as the conceited owner of a tired 486, baselessly proud of my visual basic pop-up hello-world, loudly criticising the NT code base) because de lillo can write like a dream. he writes how people are thinking and it's right. it is not how people think - at least, it's not what i listen to, in my head - but it is exactly what someone writing how someone thinks should write (and if you don't get my point tell me why pictures, and not photos, hang in the galleries).
my second comment is supposed to illustrate how de lillo has tried to write the great american novel (bet no review of this book avoids that phrase). i though it up in the shower and it seemed good back then, now it bounces between pretentious and plain crap, so let's see if it flies...
i write software, and i'm pretty good at it, and i don't pretend it's easy. the reason it's hard, and what makes it fun, even if i am paid to do it, and even if i sometimes want to shoot my boss, is that it has so many levels of hierarchy. if that sounds trite then look at some numbers: the chip in my laptop executes an instruction every 0.000000005 seconds, while a program might take 5 seconds to do something, so programming spans about 10 orders of magnitude (divide one number by the other - if you're wondering what on earth i'm talking about go read something else). it's hard to find anything else at the same level (take building, which ranges from, say, a tack 1cm long to a building 100m high: just 5 orders of magnitude).
to cope with that huge range in scale software design must use many different layers of abstraction. hence the complexity, beauty, and fun of it all.
now, in this book, de lillo is looking at 50 years of history. he's also looking at individual seconds in a person's life. that's 9 orders of magnitude. he's in the same ballpark as a software engineer. there's no way he can do this without abstraction, without layers of meaning, without building something on details that echo epochs. and, as someone who lives, works, with that kind of complexity, he gets my respect. he ain't done that bad.
having forced my way through gravity's rainbow many years ago, and stumbled out confused and unimpressed, i was apprehensive about opening this book.
i suspect i read rainbow at the same speed i read other books. fortunately, since then, i've mellowed enough to realise that approach simply won't work. for illustration: i read underworld in a little over a week, and the regeneration trilogy in a little less - both books of a similar size - but mason & dixie took months.
why so long? partly because there is a lot of quoting, with little padding to guide the understanding, and to follow the flow you have to listen to the words (many jokes would otherwise slip by). and partly because the focus can switch around without warning - unless i'm mistaken (which is possible) then at one point a character from a book being read by a relation of the narrator emerges in the main tale, for example.
enough about my frustrations. what can i say about the book? it's about two people, their lives, their relationship. it touches on the development of technology, but is more concerned about friendship and love.
i'm sorry - i don't feel i'm making a good job of reviewing this book. it's too big, i've been reading it for too long. in the last chapter two of my friends died.
this is a book about redemption, about how a community - a collection of people, at different emotional distances - can save someone.
the community in which the hero, quoyle, finds hope, is physically cold and bleak. a small newfoundland port. the life described there is so hard that each time compact discs were mentioned i was surprised that i was reading a book set in the present.
i did not understand how the community affected, saved, quoyle. one moment he is lost; the next he seems whole. maybe i am being too analytical, but i think this book is trying to be more than a simple romantic tale - somewhere i think i (or the author) missed something.
but despite my yearning for a clearer argument, this is still a strong book, clearly identifying the sources of current problems. i, for one, will not, however, be moving north.
previous latest addition
the best book i've read in a long time.
i cannot find my angle. my position on the book. i have a position on the book but, at this point in time, it is not an articulate position. it is my angle, but it is not yet in a form that can be communicated. by the appropriate process.
if i review by pastiche i will sound foolish and mocking.
take le carre. the good, slim, early books: the spy that came in from the cold; a small town in germany. cold, empty rooms. people wound up, released, left walking, clockwork, to failure. the end justifying the means. add green's quiet american.
if i review by montage i will fail to show what is new.
at the beginning of the book are three pages of reviews. i tried writing down every tenth word, i hoped to distill the essence. it failed - too many little words. the. and. but. three.
a more subjective selection gives: sentences so remote and cold and perfect they approach cruelty; characters operate in a spiritual void; a cold keening for the times we live in; the centrality of [this book] is not a person, nor even an event, but the tone of the US in 1984.
strangely, the words "passionate" and "furious" do not appear. am i alone in finding this an exceptionally angry book? the narrative voice is technical, indifferent, obscure, idiomatic, but takes emotional intensity through repetition and isolation. the effect is cumulative, working in step with "the usual plot devices" to increase tension as the story progresses. insistently, below this, is the rhythm of evasive political non-speak: the contrast is caustic sarcasm.
many of the reviews are concerned that didion is not sufficiently recognised as a writer because she is a "stylist". maybe i will understand this if i read more of her work, but from this book it is unintelligible. style and plot work together to produce a single, singular, piece of art.
[added later]
after writing the review above i heard something about didion on the radio. i cannot remember the details, but at some point her politics were mentioned as right-wing (did i mis-hear?).
at first, this struck me as very odd. after all, the book i had read seemed to be furious about the american role in nicaragua.
but then i read "play it as it lays", also by didion, and realised that she might not be identifying with anything as abstract as "america" or "nicaraguans", but with elena mcmahon and the dog killed by the mine.
is that possible?
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maybe this book should be in a separate section - crime. it starts as a noir detective story (brooding, troubled PI hunts down woman who has lost her way), but the structure becomes progressively more complex: divided into several incidents, years apart, that largely repeat the basic plot (brooding, troubled PI hunts...), but with a protaganist that becomes increasingly human: an emotionally credible character and the author himself.
it combines the brutal elegance of raymond chandler with the introspection of paul auster. the ny trilogy might be ideologically purer, but this is by far the better read.
previous latest addition
i said above that, many years ago, i was unimpressed by this book. now, i'm a fair amount older - and a little wiser - living in an alien country, and taking a 30-40 min bus ride to work every day.
so i looked through the boxes sitting in the spare room, still unpacked while we wait for the next house to be decorated, to find a book i could read again. i found gravity's rainbow.
i still haven't finished it. everyday, between las condes and providencia, i read maybe 5, 10 pages. sipping at the language, rolling it round the palate, letting the fumes rise up, spinning my head with words and ideas. my daily, illicit, intoxication - oxygen of ideas and illusions in my own tongue - filling my lungs before i sink back under the daily surge of castellano.
is it good? can i give an objective judgement from here? it is entertainting, intelligent (an author, thank god, that understands the science he is writing about), bawdy, sad-funny-angry. under a spew of speculation, contradiction, side characters and diversions, there's a "popular" plot that helps avoid the obscurity of ulysses or, say, the waste land. i'm not sure it's up there, quality-wise, with those two, but it is still awfully good.
on the other hand, the first time i read it i understood nothing.
[later, after finishing the book]
the main theme is the confusion of war - the second word war, a war in which technology played a dominant part. the simple plot i mention above never closes completely, but fades away as peace returns and traditional power structures quietly reassert themselves. war is not evil, but chaotic - things normally hidden fall into view, justifying paranoia.
the writing is fluid. often the pleasure of reading pynchon's stream of words is the only reason to turn the page, because, despite the plot and unifying theme, the book's structure seems insubstantial. more a collection of clever, often beautiful, fragments than a novel. there is a section, for example, where the slapstick, song and dance routine, chaotic devil may care attitude drops away to portray an engineer who is helpless, completely under the power of an ss officer who controls the fate of his daughter, allowing her to visit him - leaving some kind of concentration camp - for a few weeks each year. deeply disturbing stuff, but oddly out of place. that dissonance gives the section strength, but is symptomatic of the whole book, making it an unsatisfying (but impressive) read.
previous latest addition
a year or two ago a friend suggested i read richard powers when i asked about books that treat technology well while remaining "good literature". i skimmed through his books at a shop and picked plowing the dark which took as a central theme the development of virtual reality in silicon valley during the 80s.
it was a competent book, treating the technical issues well (avoiding the obvious traps/hype that you might expect from the subject matter). it didn't make me desperate to read more.
despite that, i left another book by powers - the gold bug variations - on my amazon wish list. last may it arrived as part of a birthday parcel from my parents.
and what a book! it easily makes the top dozen books i've read, despite not being the easiest read.
not the easiest read because it has an awful lot of words. if there's a choice between two words and one, powers chooses two. on the other hand, the words work (generally - a couple of places he repeated himself; where was the editor?). so there's a vague resemblance to pynchon which, with the emphasis on science, might suggest something like gravity's rainbow. but that's completely misleading - instead of pynchon's anarchic excursions and wild abandon, this has a plot, solid characters, and something approaching a traditional love story. there's structure. great gobs of it.
part of the narrative tension, particularly near the end, comes from the way this structure parallels the double helix of dna. the destinations of two couples are inter-twined and the obvious questions is: given that we know one was doomed from the first few pages, does the other follow in step?
dna - particularly the research that led to us understanding how live was encoded - threads through this book. there are lectures on the thing. allusions to cryptography, the goldberg variations, computer programming. the range and depth of ideas is simply stunning. i'd given up expecting such competent, correct science from a (good) writer.