White Noise by Delillo part 1

I've read a number of books since I last posted but I'm going to focus on White Noise since it's been highly touted. This review is going to be too long. My thoughts about why I don't like the feel of the novel take up a good chunk of it so I'm going to split this in two. First post is on my personal thoughts about why Delillo's kind of a supercilious windbag and the second post will focus more on the book itself.

The blurb on the back of the cover of White Noise describes an everyman and his family jolted out of their complacent, consumerist existence by a man-made “airborne toxic event” which forces them to reevaluate their values and view of life. I started the book anticipating the journey of an average American family forced to abandon their comfortable way of life to flee a disaster of modern society’s own making. As they moved through a growing landscape of logos and brand names, stripped of the trappings of a sheltered civilization they would eventually confront the human frailties that consumer culture hides them from. Their familial ties would be strengthened by the ordeal and they would ultimately gain a deeper understanding of themselves and human nature. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Obviously I’ve never read Don Delillo before. So let’s deal with the story I got instead.

            I must make it clear that I am not a believer in the view of consumerism espoused by the book; that modern man hides behind shopping and the acquisition of things to deny the inevitability of death or that it makes people shallow and stupid. This is partly because I don’t believe that people have fundamentally changed in the last hundred years. For ages people who can afford it have been buying the latest fashion, carriages, furniture, food and drink, pets, servants, etc to boost their ego, flaunt their wealth, and compete with others. It’s just that now more people can afford to join this game what with higher purchasing power and cheaper products. I really don’t think it’s terrible to allow the less than wealthy the pleasure of options and nicer things. Brand names and marketing have obviously become more prolific but this really only seems to be a horrible thing is you believe the pursuit of money and goods is evil. Or, if you’re like Don Delillo and never learned the art of selective attention. Seriously, I contend that most of us had a disillusioning experience with marketing at some point during our childhood and came out of the experience a little wiser and more discerning. Advertising isn’t an all-consuming parasite leeching away at out vitality and intelligence but just a part of the landscape. Amusing, annoying, unavoidable, yes, but without real impact on who we are or how we live. This is apparently not what Delillo thought in 1984 when he wrote White Noise.

            I don’t know how to explain this novel other than to say that it’s very eighties and, to be honest, kind of mean. I admit I can get frustrated at how stupid people can be but, at heart, I find most people interesting and unique. Each person contains a secret world of experience, thoughts, feelings, fears, anxieties, crimes, loves, and hopes and they exist at the center of a web of connections leading outward in an ever-expanding tangle. Each person is a story and each story, if told well, has the capacity to be interesting. The people in White Noise are denied that delicate characterization that would have breathed life into the story and are, instead, caricatures, almost automatons. I know that was probably the point, to show the hollowing of self caused by rampant consumerism but in divesting them of individuality they become difficult for the reader to connect with. Plus, they’re boring.

Zamyatin and Kellerman you know

This has been a tiring week. We got a call about our other house, the one my father inherited from his grandmother. Apparently a pipe burst due to a combination of unfortunate events and flooded the place with three feet of water, ruining the floors and ceilings and pulling cabinets away from walls. I'm not so much upset about the structure itself; if the insurance company actually does it's damn job we can get the money to rebuild. It's the stuff inside that's probably ruined that hurts.

My great-grandparents bought this house in 1952, the year it was built, as a retirement home. It's a five minute drive from the beach in a small, quiet town. This house became a repository for a lot of old family things, a number of them over 100 years old. My great-grandfather died in this house. My great-grandmother and my grandmother lived there until their deaths in 1980 (they died only a few months apart). I never met my grandparents, both were gone before I was born, but staying in this house on weekends and during the summer and winter vacations surrounded by their lives made me feel as if they were with me. My father would tell me stories about all of them when I would ask him about various books and photographs and other objects. With all these things probably destroyed it feels like they've died all over again. It's felt like grieving. And then I feel bad because there are so many others who are going through much worse and lost much more right now but I can't help it.

Anyway, the above picture is a rocking horse from that house. It was my father's. He used to play on it when he went to visit his grandparents. My sister and I played on it when we were little as well.

Eleemosynary:

a. Charitable, pertaining to alms.

b. Dependant on alms.

c. Done as an act of charity.

The OED makes it pretty clear that this word means just about anything to do with almsgiving from the donations to the institutions set up by donations to those receiving them.

I borrowed a copy of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin from a co-worker on Tuesday and finished it yesterday. It was written in 1921 in Soviet Russia at about the time when writers were beginning to be forced to write only in approved ways. We was not published there and Zamyatin was forced into exile several times during his life. It was finally published in Russia in 1988.

It's a story about a future time in which the One State controls just about every aspect of the people's lives. They live in a city surrounded by a glass wall to keep out the uncontrolled greenery of nature. In fact, just about everything is made of glass so no one can hide what they are doing. The only time they can lower shades over their rooms is when they have sex. Citizens have a Table of Hours that lays out what they should be doing at all times. They have two personal hours a day to read, write or redeem pink coupons for intercourse. They are assigned work, participate in farce elections for their Great Benefactor, chew each mouthful of food the regulation 50 times, and attend lectures that mock the disordered ways of the ancients and glorify the logical civilization that they live in.

The novel is the journal of number D-503, an engineer and mathematician working on a spaceship meant to bring the One State way of life to other planets. He is eventually seduced by I-330, a woman who is part of a revolutionary force trying to bring down the wall and break free of the state's oppressive control. It's a decent read. The story is more about the control of the One State (I think we can all guess who Zamyatin was talking about and what he was trying to say) and how a logical way of living implemented for the benefit of the majority crushes the will and individuality of the one. D-503 is diagnosed as ill, having developed a 'soul'. This causes him great anguish as he starts to distinguish the difference between himself as a complacent automaton living according to the rules and the individual he is becoming, one who has wants he can only satisfy by breaking those rules that formerly kept him happy and safe.

The writing is poetic which is a little problematic considering the writer is supposed to D-503, a person who admits he is no poet and has little imagination. He's not supposed to be very experienced at describing things and yet he does, quite beautifully. I think the novel would have been stronger if his writing had started out humdrum and eventually moved towards being luminous and fey. The "love" part of the story (which seems more like lust to me but so many writers get the two confused so pfft I guess) is not very original; his friendship with R and his companionship with his regular lover O is disrupted by the temptress I. D experiences confusion about what is happening to him and what he should do to resolve things one way or the other.

I have a few problems with the book but nothing majorly off-putting. Gendered roles and stereotypes seem to have persisted a thousand years into the future in this 'egalitarian' society but it was written in the late teens. I don't understand why a controlling state would allow its citizens to decide for themselves who they want to have sex with rather than just assigning them regular partners. It doesn't matter I suppose. It was a good read.

Now I'm finishing up Jonathan Kellerman's first Alex Delaware novel When the Bough Breaks. Like all of his books there is much that could have been edited out; scenes of the main character receiving directions to locations or phoning his girlfriend to tell her he has to make a short out of town trip. The reader doesn't need several paragraphs describing these rather boring phone conversations. The author can tell us in a couple of sentences that it happened. We don't need to know how to get to the university. "If you're coming from downtown take I-5 to 520 which turns into the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. Drive all the way across the bridge to the east shore, turn south at Fairweather and continue along the coastline." I'm not going to go there. There are many instances like this and all they serve to do is break up the narration. Nor do we need to listen to Robin and Alex debate about whether she should accompany him on his trip or not. Alex himself is a rather boring character and the amount of interest he attracts from women in this book and throughout the entire series has always baffled me. Robin's characterization bounces between needy and supportive depending on what will make Alex look best in any given scene. Characters are often portrayed by stereotypes. The entire book reads like a barely veiled diatribe at the way society as a whole treats children. And yet despite the many flaws of Kellerman's writing style and characterization I keep reading his books. What can I say? The man knows how to create interesting plots.

I don't even know what to say about the earthquake in Japan. The whole thing is heartbreaking and I hope that the reports about more than 1,000 people being dead are not true. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to have everything swept away, to have an entire town flooded and broken. Where I live there are basically no earthquakes. A little further north they occasionally have one that feels like a truck passing by. The ground is a solid thing to me. That picture in The Washington Post of the road literally split in two was awe-inspiring. Like those gigantic sinkholes that sometimes open up, it shows how fragile the terrain we walk on (or drive on) can be. The only good thing (if there can be a good thing) about the whole situation is that Japan is a developed country that has made massive preparations for just this sort of emergency. They've reinforced many larger buildings and they're not unused to earthquakes. This will not be another Haiti. My heart and prayers go out to the people of Japan and I hope that recovery will be relatively swift.

And now I will return to my (semi)regularly scheduled post.

Senescence: "The process or condition of growing old." From the OED.

I finished Perfume by Suskind last night. I stayed up late to do so. I hated it by the end. I was trying to be nice and give it the benefit of the doubt earlier but really? It was kind of boring and obnoxious. The writing was beautiful but the plot and the characters were rather uninteresting. There is very little dialogue in this book and as a result there is very little meaningful character interaction. The main character, Grenouille, is the only one that is fully developed. This would be fine but I found myself increasingly disliking him. I honestly couldn't tell if this was the author's intention or not. I did not find myself supporting Grenouille in his endeavors. I was wishing that he would fail. Admittedly this was because he was murdering young women but also because I had no vested interest in seeing him succeed. It was actually the opposite; I wanted him to be caught and punished.

There seems to be some sort of moralizing going on in the book. People are easily influenced by Grenouille's scents because their baser instincts come through in reaction to odors regardless of the civilized veneer they present to the world. Grenouille has no scent himself and is not affected by the perfumes he creates. I have several problems with this. One, I know we are all animals driven by base instincts that we counter-balance with higher feeling. There's little more irritating than being lectured by someone who thinks they've discovered some new truth when they haven't. Two, I just don't believe smells can have that much of an effect. You can't sneak by people just because you are wearing eau-de-wall-flower. People would still see and hear you. Sound is a very powerful force as well. Maybe Grenouille didn't rely much on sight but other people do. I won't even comment on the ridiculous nature of the final perfume. It was just plain stupid. Third, Grenouille is presented as having basically no human feeling (and believing himself to be above human instinct) and this is linked to his odorless state. One quibble; he does have human feeling. He smells a scent that sends his heart racing and he wants to possess it. He is obsessed with owning something that has great meaning to him. He wants it even as he knows that having means its eventual destruction. This is a very human trait. I could probably argue for others but this is getting too long already so I'll move on to a couple other annoyances in the book.

Beautiful virgin girls apparently smell the best of all. Oh good fucking hell. Really? You're going with that? You're going to compare the harvesting of their scent to harvesting flowers? Budding breasts and blossoms. Picking flowers to deflowering a virgin. Oh how clever. Suskind, your imagination knows no bounds, I'm sure.

There's more to be annoyed about but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that this is a surprisingly boring book with lovely, sensual prose and an abhorrent main character.

I'm still reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac and I'm also reading Missing by Karin Alvtegen. The idea of having a homeless woman as the main character is intriguing. She's on the edge of society and her life on the run (she's been falsely accused of murder) is exacerbated by her lack of funds and a support network. We'll see where this goes.

In which Saramago disappoints me

So I'm looking for surreal fiction to read and NoveList suggests Haruki Murakami, William S. Burroughs, and Jose Saramago. I read After Dark and that's a nice little tale and then I read Naked Lunch and that makes no sense but in a rather pleasant way and then I follow up with Blindness. I could deal with the writing style where paragraphs were pages long and the dialogue is separated by commas with no he said, she said and only capitalization to indicate a new speaker. I could plow through that obnoxiousness. However I couldn't ignore the rampant stupidity, the transparent and trite lesson equating loss of sight to loss of morality and the inability to "see" the humanity of others.

So a bunch of people struck by a "white blindness" are herded into the wing of an abandoned insane asylum to quarantine them from society while those that still see but have been exposed occupy the opposite wing, while the military runs the detention from the outside. One, I think it would have been much better if he'd cut out the role of the military and the group of contaminated but seeing detainees. That would have left him with only a civilization struck by an unknown illness and would have made his "moral" less muddled. If those who lost their "moral vision" were sunk into savagery and anarchy what was up with the military? You could argue that they were afraid but if they just followed their protocols they would be fine.

Which brings me to a point that bugs me. He ignores perfectly reasonable solutions to the problem in an attempt (I assume) to bring about a feeling of magical realism but he focuses too often on the nitty-gritty of living to allow complete suspension of disbelief. There's a focus on bodily functions, feces smeared floors, burying of corpses, festering wounds, and incredibly tedious descriptions of people attempting to orient themselves in their new environment while the narrator ponders weightily at you. The logistics of keeping several hundred unexpected prisoners is nit-picked over but nobody has a fucking bio-hazard suit? There are no quarantine areas with decontamination chambers? Nobody thinks to hire a few caretakers who are already blind and acclimated to keep order in the wings? The detainees are so incompetent that they are unable to organize them selves despite the disability? That's the first thing people do when they find themselves in strange situations. Well maybe that happened after page 108 because that's where I stopped. I said to myself "this author is trying to be dark and edgy. I bet there's an unnecessary and graphic rape ahead." So I checked the Amazon reviews and I must be psychic because apparently there is indeed a lovingly described gang rape scene. Joy. Don't be subtle, Saramago, why don't you tell us what you think of humanity. Anyway, I will continue on my quest for real surreal, experimental fiction.