In Which We Find You Something To Read This Summer

Summer Reading

by JANE HU

This is the first in a series.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

I know. You're thinking, "Duh." I know. But I had not read Middlemarch until this summer. It always loomed before me in its sheer and sprawling magnitude, which is also what makes it the paradigmatic summer read. Dorothea Brooke quickly becomes a commonplace in any book-nerd’s vocabulary, but she’s not by any means the only actor in Eliot’s novel. There's Tertius Lydgate — the over-ambitious doctor whose dreams begin to unravel, rather tragically, from the start — and Casaubon, who, presented before any romantic girl, should invoke all the important questions (“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”; “Mr. Casaubon is so sallow”; “Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?”). Even small characters round out, if only due to the imaginative range inspired by Eliot’s sympathetic eye. Not only witty and intelligent, Eliot is endlessly mature in her insights. The sentences that make Middlemarch a page-turner are also nuggets of enlightened gold.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh came to resent the fact that Brideshead Revisted was his most celebrated book. The lush sentimentality of Brideshead makes it the novel most unlike his others. Nearly two decades after its publication, Waugh would do, perhaps, what he does best: satirize the extravagant manor drama in the conclusion to his war trilogy, Sword of Honour.

The savage ironist comes out with both pistols cocked in A Handful of Dust. Tony and Brenda are married, but that doesn’t stop Brenda from her affair with John Beaver. Lies accumulate and both sides seem to know the score, but that doesn’t stop them from keeping up all pretenses to sincerity. There will be jokes you’ll want to retell your friends — jokes that will make you (I swear!) LOL — but these won’t translate well out of context. They’ll just have to read the whole damn thing themselves. 

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

Incidentally, Tessa Hadley recently recommended this novel on her list, Five Best Books: Betrayals of Love. One would be remiss not to agree with Hadley: The Heat of the Day is most strikingly a love story. But it is also a postwar narrative, stitched with the precarious threads of paranoia, espionage, interrogation, and, yes, finally betrayal. Bowen places her characters amid the foggy hours of summer’s dusk, where a step toward the bar means to risk confessing — or leaking — too much information.

As heroine of this detective tale, Stella Rodney exemplifies the double agent: torn between Nazi spy Robert Kelway and his pursuant, the counter-espionage agent Robert Harrison. Bowen’s choice of names does not, of course, result from carelessness. The entire novel rivets the reader with twisting wordplay that makes the text itself into a document to be scanned with scrutinizing care.

Less than Angels by Barbara Pym

There are a lot of modernist lady writers who have unjustly fallen out of vogue, print, and the ever-contemporizing discourse on the canon (which says, really, so much about the canon). It’s not just that a lot of intelligent texts penned by women have been prematurely left behind, but also that so much delightfully entertaining literature has been kept from our hungry eyes.  

Less than Angels is an academic satire on a group of anthropologists at the African Institute in London and it is better written, smarter, and sharper than that other one (Lucky Jim). If writing today, Pym might disseminate some sassy social commentary on a blog that would, each time, tap into a cultural tic. It’s not too late, though, to read her now. 

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

The Comfort of Strangers is a slim book, but that’s not the reason anyone reads something ten times. No matter how familiar, McEwan’s sentences keep on giving. Each time you return to Mary and Colin lounging in their Venetian hotel, you’ll be charged with a greater sense of uncertainty and anticipation despite how — or more likely because — you know the ending. He’s a writer who can do that. Every new detail will slice deeper as the prelude to an impending break from innocence.

Taking directly from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, McEwan lures his lovers into the same labyrinthine city and subjects them to an infusion of pornography, sex, and carnality that, at times, resembles a Lynchian daydream. A heat emanates from the novel — interwoven with a blur of white linen — that might make your beach experience seem relatively cooler. 

Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

“Everything is Green” — a short (short!) story in the collection titled above — was the first thing I ever read by Wallace. It is also my favorite thing by him. Those 700 or so words are like panacea for the heart. They will make you feel things you thought your ironic, discerning, postmodern non-self no longer had the fragility to feel. Those last three sentences will knock you about a bit and leave you searching for those lost pieces that will help recall your vulnerability again. Wallace is at his best when he intimates that love still has the capacity to make one culpable — for potentially anything or anyone — in this world.

Aside from “Everything is Green,” the other stories are punctuated with subtitles or historical quotes from magazines that make them perfect for reading in transit. Once, immersed in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (the longest of them all), I started riding the same line back and forth, end to end, in order to finish it. I probably should have just gotten off, but Wallace’s words are terribly conducive to motion. Sentences like “The lover tries to traverse: there is motion of travel, except no travel,” while seductively ambiguous, are also profoundly tender. In "Little Expressionless Animals,” Alex Trebek asks, "Is there such a thing as an intellectual caress?" Yes! Certainly! But, don’t forget, Wallace goes far beyond the head. A Wallace’s sentence is perpetually "giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?" So that content— thought — becomes also a gesture, a caress. 

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys might be the darker companion piece to Out of Sheer Rage on this list. Both narrators seek to complete their magnum opuses. Both recognize, rather openly, how this more or less won’t happen. Both continue onwards with the task. It is this persistent faith — overpowering all futility and shame — which makes Chabon’s protagonist and Dyer’s narrator both so exasperatingly sympathetic.

Like Dyer’s book, Wonder Boys is madly playful, but Chabon makes his protagonist even more self-willed in his delusions that, because we grudgingly care about him, it often hurts. Grady Tripp embodies the despondent professor and fading author as he blunders through Chabon’s campus novel, besieged by his own self-contradictions. At first I think I hate him, but then he opens his mouth and says something beautiful. 

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer

Dyer’s pseudo-memoir begins with aims to tackle an academic book on D. H. Lawrence, and amounts to a 232 page first-person narration of this maddening tussle. While Lawrence’s name appears on nearly each page, the novel is only tangentially about the author. Dyer is too distracted and restless to get down to the task of writing, so he goes travelling instead, bounding back and forth between London, Rome, Paris, Greece…unable to settle anywhere for long since stillness immediately brings only dissatisfaction. We follow the breathless pace of his mental and physical journey (where not much, honestly, happens) eagerly. The book is a viciously funny monologue — a couple hundred pages of exquisitely readable whining. It’s also a travelogue, punctuated by rather stunning philosophical insight and sometimes, goodness forbid, even literary criticism.

At one point, Dyer questions the novelistic form, as he yearns for something more compatible with lived experience: notes, letters, thoughts that exemplify the act of becoming rather than retrospectively pieced-together states of being. His phrases reenact the errant (and frequently banal) movements of self-destructive behavior in ways that are therapeutic to the reader and, presumably, also writer. He wishes the book to be “not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing.” It’s not merely “look-no-hands” prose, for we actually believe Dyer in his aimless, sometimes careless, search for faith from unexpected sources. Finally, you will laugh.

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

Are you fascinated with lists? Tabulations? Catalogues? Collectors? Hunters? Binomial nomenclature? Language systems? Historical fiction set in the 18th century London (but written in the 1990s)? Enlightenment ideals? Giants? Freaks? Monsters? Frankenstein? Diseases? Bodies? Animal fables? Sapient pigs? The distinctions between moral pain, physical pain, and emotional pain? The very history of pain? The incommunicability of pain? Regarding the pain of others? Allusions? Expostulations on print capitalism and commodity culture? Ireland? Or perhaps Scotland? Medicine? Experiments? Surgery? Corpses? Crimes? Bioethics? Torture? Cruelty? Sex? Science? Wonder? Magic? Cures? The afterlife of pain? The afterlife itself? Whichever way you spin it, Mantel’s stories nearly recommend themselves. The novel stitches together the narratives of the eponymous Giant and a scientist-of-questionable-ethics John Hunter. It will be unlike anything you have ever encountered. 

The Complete Letters of Henry James: Vol 1 & 2

James wrote a lot of beautiful novels, but most of them might stand to be too meandering in their verbosity and too static in their action to amount to any riotous summer reading. Letters are my answer to bite-sized James without being sacrilegious (anyway, it’s rather unimaginable that anyone might abridge him). James wrote a lot of beautiful novels because, well, everything that man touched turned to crystal-refracted insight, so you can damn well bet that the letters are better prose than most could ever dream up, given infinite time, a keyboard, and a backspace. “There’s no telling where my pen may take me,” he muses to his mother in 1869.

Describing the American individual, James writes, “There is but one word to use in regard to them — vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Their ignorance — their stingy, defiant grudging attitude towards everything European— their perpetual reference of all things to some American standard or precedent which exists only in their own unscrupulous wind-bags—and then our unhappy poverty of voice, of speech and of physiognomy—these things glare at you hideously.” (Other times he checks himself: “But I must stay my gossiping hand. . . .”) But James was a grand American—the best kind there is; the type that leaves America for some time. Frequently, James would sign off: “Thy lone and loving exile.” Beyond all this, his correspondences offer a counterpoint to James as the mythic man of studious seclusion, where one can experience — almost unmediated — the reeling joy, the vitalizing discernment, that is so crucially tied to his genius. 

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

For many, the defining feature of Netherland is its status as a post-9/11 novel. Others emphatically describe it as first and foremost a postcolonial re-writing of The Great Gatsby. It’s also a detective story set in the dazed summer months. Hans van der Broek — Dutch-born American immigrant — is left in New York by his London-bound wife and son. He subsequently befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, an American dreamer from Trinidad. However you read it, Netherland is politically thoughtful, while also rhetorically sensitive and stunning.

O’Neill handles Hans’s ethical impasses (no matter how confusedly they compound) with quiet sympathy, and treats cricket as the moral barometer that might finally redeem us. If so many “readable” novels don’t leave enough breathing space to let you simply think, then Netherland is an exception: “I was bowled over. I had never considered the possibility of undiscovered factors.” What the novel says is underpinned with the swiftest strokes of intelligence — a plurality of “factors.” Yet, how it is said never fails to move on an individual level. Be careful. You might end up feeling the right emotions for the wrong reasons. 

Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

In the fall of third year, I took to putting those accumulating New Yorkers to use and began toting them to the gym. I’d ride the elliptical and read until either the machine or the small print wore me out. I’d stumble along the treadmill while quietly mouthing Sam Shephard’s dialogue. It was through this routine that I discovered Moore’s story "Childcare", which had, by the time of my reading it, been expanded into a novel, The Gate at the Stairs. This I would not have promptly registered had I not been so enraptured with Moore’s protagonist, Tassie Keltjin, as to Google her. Needless to say, the novel was bought. It’s a Chekhovian bildungsroman set in the American Midwest — this generation’s version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for small town 20-somethings.

Full of lyrical turns and natural imagery, The Gate at the Stairs is compelling even when depicting the most quotidian phenomena. Tassie goes to college and babysits a recently adopted mixed-race baby. She falls in love, sort of. She grows up. Sort of. The most common criticism of Moore’s novel is that Tassie sounds wildly wise beyond her years — her voice is too witty, too mature, too world-weary. But, I’m thinking, “Nah, girls are sad when they’re twenty. They frequently long to feel heavy. At least I did.” For me, Moore got Tassie right.

Jane Hu is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer currently based in Berlin. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels.

"Slow Motion" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

"The Days" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

"Time of My Life" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

More Books To Fill Your Idle Time

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

In Which We Explore The Archives Of David Foster Wallace

Holy Text 

by JESSE KLEIN

In March 2010, the University of Texas at Austin and the Harry Ransom Center acquired David Foster Wallace’s archives and later that year made them publicly available. Since then, professors, PhD students and journalists have come from around the world to sit with Wallace’s collected, unpublished writings. Since his suicide in September 2008, he has become something larger than he was in life, not just a seminal 20th century writer, a descendent of Pynchon and DeLillo. He has become a cultural, and, cult, figure of mythic status, a Kurt Cobain or Hunter Thompson. For someone who taught so many how to live, Wallace’s decision not to was and is met with confusion, debate, and sorrow.

Archives provide a fan with the opportunity to spend time with the author, with their private thoughts, with what they chose not to share. It gives the reader the chance to look at the raw data without a filter, the biographer. To sift through his archives, something I undertook over a weeklong span, is to celebrate the intentional fallacy, not to draw lines from work to person and back to work, but to better understand the person who created the work, out of curiosity and love for someone who put together strings of words, and webs from those strings, that mean so much to so many people, including myself.

There are thirty-four densely packed boxes. The Harry Ransom Center along with Wallace’s widow Karen Green and his family have kept everything: travel documents, college homework, early drafts of articles, essays, short stories and novels, drawings and poems from childhood. The idea was less to read everything, to engulf every snippet of information but more so to gain insight into who he was, why he was, until he stopped being. Suicide is a mode of death inherently linked to a person’s life, and in his writing, as well as his archives, it is ever-present.

BOX 26 is devoted to Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King, set for release this April. The box is made up of dozens, and dozens, of pages of handwritten prose, a handwriting that is not cursive nor print, that takes up one fifth of a line carefully lining the bottom, that leans slightly to the right, or, forward. The first section in the box is called "Fierce Infant", written in the 1st person, in a green, roller ball pen. At the top of the first page, written in caps is the word "FREEWRITING" and next to it an arrow pointing to "potential title for piece." Though, only two pages later, two brilliant pages later, the words "freewriting – means nothing" are written next to "dead prose" which are entombed in a box in the upper right hand corner. These self-denigrating quips are one of the few consistencies from a person with such varied interests, talents. He let himself go on for three more pages only to write "now what" at the end. It did not seem like he gave himself the space to write freely.

It’s been said that The Pale King will be about boredom and taxes. From 1998 onward, Wallace took undergraduate Accounting courses while teaching undergraduate English courses. In his notebooks for these Accounting classes, notebooks that were at once pristinely kept and littered with scattered thoughts, were questions like, "What is 'bypass trust'?" and "explain 'forensic accountant' – tracks money laundering". In BOX 26, there were three chockfull folders of accounting related documents i.e. his homework. On one loose sheet he wrote, "David Wallace (Patty – can I just see how I did? I won't normally ask you to grade me J)." He got 10/10 on the quiz. But you could see through this work that Wallace was not, and likely will not in his book, merely discuss the minutiae of the IRS, the aching tedium it entails. In one correspondence to an academic, he wondered,

Does the IRS or Treasury Dept. have any studies of just how much noncompliance the US Tax System could withstand? That is, have they done any studies of just how many taxpayers would have to refuse to pay before (a) there would be too many to prosecute, and (b) the government would be hurt by lack of income. (a kind of tipping point in other words.)

Wallace is getting at the human condition at its most primal, money/survival, albeit in an oblique, Kafkaesque way. He later asked, "what did hospitals have before ICU’s?" In asking so many questions he finally had to explain, "I have a vague, hard-to-explain interest in accounting and tax policy (utterly divorced from my own taxes, which I pay promptly and fully like an eagle scout)." Stephen Lacy, a CFO, enjoyed the correspondence, understood Wallace's aims, and so in turn offered this as the "most difficult sentence to understand in tax code":

For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501(c)(4), (5), or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501(c)(3).

It's fun to imagine what Wallace might have done with this dizzying code. Statements like these are impossibly dense but through his translation, they become totally clear. This was one of Wallace’s gifts: he would discuss infinity, or fatalism, or the footnotes of footnotes of tax laws, but would do so with language that was plain, inviting. His use of "like" as written stutter, or of "stuff" in place of the appropriate noun, made Wallace an approachable giant, a Midwesterner, a guy.

(In his review of Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Blindfold, these were his opening remarks: "The point of this review is going to be that The Blindfold is a really good book. The first neat thing about it is that the jacket copy and blurbs are interesting." These statements would have lost marks on a freshman mid-term paper. At times he could be deliberately, though misleadingly, simple.)

Wallace is accessible in part because he’s funny. When he calls Sting "resoundingly unthespian" regarding Dune, that’s funny. When he calls Updike "heartbreakingly naïve" and guilty of a "radical self-absorption" when talking about his novel Toward the End of Time, that’s funny too. And when he wrote his magazine editors, with a conviction and ardor rarely seen from a person so polite, so docile, he’s frightening, and also funny. When Harper's published a section of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, he had this to say:

DAVE W'S CONDITIONS OF SUBMISSION:

(1) inform auth of Decision to Reject w/in 48 hrs of Decision;

(2) any/all rejected pieces are to be shredded, the shreds placed in a burn bag, then that bag emptied into a high wind at least ten (10) miles from any metropolitan area. we will be watching.

Maybe he was kidding, maybe not. He probably was and he wasn’t. For his Roger Federer article, he said that if they changed more than 100-200 words, he would happily take the "kill fee" and not publish it at all. And, again with Harper's, this time with his Kafka piece, he wrote, "I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering if you fuck with the mechanics of the piece." Even here, he could not resist a footnote, it reads, "It may take years for the opportunity to arise. I'm very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis." The “Ask Charis" is chilling, proof that this has happened before. Just ask Charis.

But all this is gravy. All stuff that's preaching to the converted. People know who David Foster Wallace is because he wrote a big, hard, necessary book called Infinite Jest. Based on Wallace’s other writings, his readers know that this is the book he lived to write. All of his passions and preoccupations are there: addiction, tennis, terrorism, TV, prescription drug use, religion, depression. Wallace researched the material that populates the book for years, in a way, was always researching for it.

Wallace was a devoted Alcoholics Anonymous member, and much of Infinite Jest takes place within the sacred circle of AA meetings. Throughout the early 90s, he went to meetings in the Boston area and listened. And took notes. On a page titled "Heard At Meetings", in BOX 15, he transcribed things like, "If you’ve never considered suicide, stay sober for a while", and, "I shit myself every day for years", but also things like, "I see her spending a lot of time laughing", and, "They say it's good for the soul, but I feel nothing inside that you could call a soul." This last quote was recopied into an Infinite Jest notebook in December ’92.

The notebooks from that time, his "siege in the room", were about everything (like Infinite Jest), but from his giving, sad, man-who-knew-too-much vantage point. On high school politics: "the trick for being neither nerd nor quite jock — be no one." On the future of telecommunications: "Audio phone conversations both let you presume the other person was paying complete attention to you and let you not have to pay complete attention to them." Next to this statement is an arrow pointing to "Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960." His brain was a supercomputer of pop culture. A line is drawn from phony phone conversations to the way television betrayed Nixon’s coolness thirty years before, commenting on Star Trek, predicting Skype.

But the underside, the darkness, everything else he always thought about, was never far, was probably always there. While going through a folder in BOX 15 a loose sheet from a yellow legal pad fell to the floor. It read, "I don’t think it’s an accident that people that shoot themselves shoot themselves in the head." No explanation, just those words in a sea of yellow indifference.

"Good Old Neon", a short story that appears in the 2004 collection Oblivion, is perhaps Wallace’s most deliberate, unadorned conversation with himself. I first read it in a car ride from Montreal to New York on a sunny, summer day. Through the Adirondacks, with my sister on my right and my parents in the front, I was totally destroyed and absolutely electrified. When I finished the story, I couldn’t speak, I just thought to myself remembering the time before I read the story, who I was then, a couple hours ago.

In it, a man sees a "therapist" (a word he later changed to "analyst"), finds it useless, and, without alternative, decides to kill himself. In BOX 24, at the top of the first page of this first handwritten draft is "FRAUD" followed by, "This is the bad part, the foggy part where there's way more than I can ever make you see." Wallace, and the reader, has no choice but to go on.

In different pen colors, blue to black to red to green, the story gets better, shorter, fuller. Where there was once an "analyst" with a "mustache", there is later an "analyst" with a "small ginger mustache", a mustache that is likely taken seriously by its owner and not by anyone else. In his revisions, Wallace would not only correct himself but comment, taunt. Unsatisfied with the first few pages, he wrote at the top of four above the first line, "(I know this part is boring and probably boring you, but it gets a lot more interesting after I kill myself)." This aside made it into the final version of the story. But even the thin sheen of self-defacing humor fades away: "Everything gets so abstract all this free-writing I can't be bothered to even type up. We tried to bombard our problems with will power instead of bringing it into alignment with God’s intention for us." Wallace did not write or talk in extremes, he lived in them.

"Good Old Neon" ends with an oracular exhale, a portion of prose that makes the reader at once alive, aware, terrified, and tired. After going over it for probably the hundredth time, he wrote in a tidy box, "incoherent, but moving." The story is dense, bleak, again necessary, but not incoherent. The last line on that page is also that, "[Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.]" It is no longer the "I" of the protagonist, or the writer, but a "we" that includes us in the nightmare, a self-imposed nightmare, though it feels inevitable.

At the start of the week, in BOX 31, I sifted through an assortment of Wallace gems. In a 70-page, one-subject notebook called "Midwesternisms", he wrote down verbal tics like "because you know why?" "I had a circumstance happen" and "Just let them get it under their belt and chew on it a while." Later, a list of "Good names", among them '1st name: Tova', 'Pat Rexroat' and 'Elpidia Carter.'" On college tests, professors cooed, "un plaisir, mon vieux" and "I am particularly impressed by your thoroughness." Then, amidst the praise was a page ripped from a spiral notebook with the date "7/31/96" in the top left-hand corner. July 1996 was six months after the release of Infinite Jest, at the height of its praise, a thousand page text that was being lauded as an Important Work, a Big Book. A time most would consider the culmination of a young writer's career. At that time he wrote, "The thing is I get scared it won’t come. I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke." Then, "'Until there is commitment, there is only ineffectiveness, delay.' - Goethe How to make a commitment – to writing, to a somewhat healthy rltp, to myself."

At the end of this entry, in a journal he felt it was not fit for, was this:

What balance would look like

2-3 hours a day in writing

Up at 8-9

Only a couple late nights a week

Daily exercise

Minimum time spent teaching

2 nights/week spent w/other friends

5 AA/week Church

This was the balance he sought, the life he needed. But a towering intellect does not always come with a rock-hard disposition, a disposition to match a brain like Wallace's. In his writing, and in his archives, he was always battling himself, playing himself in a mental tennis match. His archives show that that match was exhausting, tragic, joyous, and now endless.

I visited my friend at Sarah Lawrence in October 2008 just weeks after Wallace’s death. Many on campus were still in mourning, talked about him as if he was a close friend they'd all lost. I knew who he was, had seen a big blue paperback of his on people’s shelves a few times before, had picked it up once to see how heavy it was. When I asked people why they were so upset they could only respond with their own question: "Have you read him?" I hadn't.

I then tried unsuccessfully to read that big blue book, Infinite Jest. I failed for the same reasons many people do: the footnotes were burdensome, the first 250 pages were dense and largely unconnected. Feeling defeated, I tried semi-successfully to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I finished it, engaged with it, though felt that there were long stretches where I would drift, where I felt I was being forced to endure linguistic acrobatics. It was his nonfiction — arguably his more accessible work — that was my entry point. I’ve since reread his fiction and cherish it all (including Infinite Jest) for its richness, its complexities, for the fact that his voice is at once ours and uniquely his. So, to explore his archives seemed the closest thing to spending time with a person you love and admire, though you don’t know, and never will.

Sitting there, in the Harry Ransom Center, felt like a religious experience. I had an HB pencil (no ink allowed), yellow computer paper, and those thirty-four boxes (though only one at a time). I could not decide if I wanted to listen to my iPod or not as I didn't want to taint his words, to change their meaning by mingling them with song lyrics. Many times, I had physical reactions to what I was reading. Goosebumps. Sweat. A heaviness in my legs. I would catch myself laughing aloud but only because three people were staring at me. It was embarrassing, having these personal responses among eighty year-old academics, chatty librarians, bored sophomores working the front desk. That week, there were so many of those moments where you see or hear something you know is vital, life giving, and say to yourself, "This is one of those." And all you can really say is thanks. Thanks so much.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer and filmmaker living in Austin. He last wrote in these pages about Trent Reznor. You can find his previous work on This Recording here. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"Where You Are" - The Submarines (mp3)

"Birds" - The Submarines (mp3)

"A Satellite, Stars, and an Ocean Behind You" - The Submarines (mp3)

 

In Which The Quarrels of The Dead Are Beyond Our Control

Impotent and Extremely Bummed

or, "Less Like John Updike Than Like Somebody Doing A Mean Parody Of John Updike"

Seminal malignant narcissist/withered phallocrat John Updike gets tenderly ripped the fuck up by ponytailed Gen-X tennis ace dreamboat David Foster Wallace in this New York Observer critique from '97. Included in DFW's essay collection Consider The Lobster.

Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?

by DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The New York Observer
October 13, 1997

"Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song."

- John Updike, Midpoint, 1969

Mailer, Updike, Roth -- the Great Male Narcissists* who've dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist's terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60s and 70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.

As were Freud's, Mr. Updike's big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order), and the fact that the mood of his books has gotten more wintery in recent years is understandable -- Mr. Updike has always written largely about himself, and since the surprisingly moving Rabbit at Rest he's been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who's keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape. I'm afraid the preceding sentence is this review's upshot, and most of the balance here will consist of presenting evidence/justification for such a disrespectful assessment.

First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I'd like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans. Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do think that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics.

And even since Rabbit Is Rich -- as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding indication that the author understood that they were repellent -- I've continued to read Mr. Updike's novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose. Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.'s. But it's Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason -- mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:

"Just a penis with a thesaurus."

"Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?"

"Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny."

These are actual -- trust me -- quotations, and I've heard even worse ones, and they're all usually accompanied by the sort of facial expression where you can tell there's not going to be any profit in arguing or talking about the esthetic pleasure of Mr. Updike's prose. None of the other famous phallocrats of his generation -- not Mailer, not Frederick Exley or Charles Bukowski or even the Samuel Delany of Hogg -- excites such violent dislike.

There are, of course, some obvious explanations for part of this dislike -- jealousy, iconoclasm, P.C. backlash, and the fact that many of our parents revere Mr. Updike and it's easy to revile what your parents revere. But I think the major reason so many of my generation dislike Mr. Updike and the other G.M.N.'s has to do with these writers' radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.

Mr. Updike, for example, has for years been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy (see for example Rabbit Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech, Rev. Tom Marshfield, Roger's Version's "Uncle Nunc") and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author himself. They always live in either Pennsylvania or New England, are unhappily married/divorced, are roughly Mr. Updike's age. Always either the narrator or the point-of-view character, they all have the author's astounding perceptual gifts; they all think and speak in the same effortlessly lush, synesthetic way Mr. Updike does.

They are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody -- and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don't love women. The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.

I'm guessing that for the young educated adults of the 60s and 70s, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents' generation, Mr. Updike's evocation of the libidinous self appeared redemptive and even heroic. But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.

Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself. Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Mr. Updike's latest novel, is 66 years old and heading for just such a death, and he's shitlessly scared. Like so many of the novelist's protagonists, though, Turnbull seems to be scared of all the wrong things.

Toward the End of Time is being marketed by its publisher as an ambitious departure for Mr. Updike, his foray into the futuristic-dystopic tradition of Aldous Huxley and soft sci-fi. The year is A.D. 2020, and time has not been kind. A Sino-American missile war has killed millions and ended centralized government as Americans know it. The dollar's gone; Massachusetts now uses scrip named for Bill Weld. No taxes -- local toughs now get protection money to protect the upscale from other local toughs.

AIDS has been cured, the Midwest is depopulated, and parts of Boston are bombed out and (presumably?) irradiated. An abandoned space station hangs in the night sky like a junior moon. There are tiny but rapacious "metallobioforms" that have mutated from toxic waste and go around eating electricity and the occasional human. Mexico has reappropriated the U.S. Southwest and is threatening wholesale invasion even as thousands of young Americans are sneaking across the Rio Grande in search of a better life. America, in short, is getting ready to die.

The book's postmillennial elements are sometimes cool, and they truly would represent an interesting departure for Mr. Updike if they weren't all so sketchy and tangential. What 95 percent of Toward the End of Time actually consists of is Turnbull describing the prenominate flora (over and over as each season passes) and his brittle, castrating wife Gloria, and remembering the ex-wife who divorced him for adultery, and rhapsodizing about a young prostitute he moves into the house when Gloria's away on a trip.

It's also got a lot of pages of Turnbull brooding about decay and mortality and the tragedy of the human condition, and even more pages of Turnbull talking about sex and the imperiousness of the sexual urge and detailing how he lusts after assorted secretaries and neighbors and bridge partners and daughters-in-law and a little girl who's part of the group of young toughs he pays protection to, a 13-year-old whose breasts -- "shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples" -- Turnbull finally gets to fondle in the woods behind his house when his wife's not looking.

In case this sounds like a harsh summary, here's hard statistical evidence of just how much a "departure" for Mr. Updike this novel really is:

Total number of pages about the Sino-American war -- causes, duration, casualties: 0.75;

Total number of pages about deadly mutant metallobioforms: 1.5;

Total number of pages about flora around Turnbull's home, plus fauna, weather and how his ocean view looks in different seasons: 86;

Total number of pages about Mexico's repossession of the U.S. Southwest: 0.1;

Total number of pages about Ben Turnbull's penis and his various feelings about it: 7.5;

Total number of pages about the prostitute's body, with particular attention to sexual loci: 8.75;

Total number of pages about golf: 15;

Total number of pages of Ben Turnbull saying things like "I want women to be dirty" and "We are condemned, men and women, to symbiosis" and "She was a choice cut of meat and I hoped she held out for a fair price" and "The sexual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact": 36.5.

The novel's best parts are a half-dozen little set pieces where Turnbull imagines himself inhabiting different historical figures -- a tomb-robber in ancient Egypt, Saint Mark, a guard at a Nazi death camp, etc. They're gems, and I wished there were more of them. The problem is that they don't serve much of a function here other than to remind us that Mr. Updike can write great imaginative set pieces when he's in the mood. Their justification in the novel stems from the fact that the narrator is a science fan.

Turnbull is particularly keen on subatomic physics and something he calls the theory of "many worlds" -- which actually dates from 1957 and is a proposed solution to certain quantum paradoxes entailed by the principles of Uncertainty and Complementarity, and which is unbelievably abstract and complicated but which Turnbull seems to think is roughly the same thing as the Theory of Past-Life Channeling, apparently thereby explaining the set pieces where Turnbull is somebody else. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing the way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.

Better, and more convincingly "futuristic," are the narrator's soliloquies on the blue-to-red shift and the eventual implosion of the known universe near the book's end, and this would be among the novel's highlights, too, if it weren't for the fact that Turnbull is interested in cosmic apocalypse only because it serves as a grand metaphor for his own personal death -- likewise all the Housmanesque descriptions of the optometrically significant "Year 2020," and the book's final, heavy description of "small pale moths [that] have mistakenly hatched" on a late-autumn day and now "flip and flutter a foot or two above the asphalt as if trapped in a narrow wedge of space-time beneath the obliterating imminence of winter."

The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the prose, John Updike's great strength for almost 40 years. Toward the End of Time has occasional flashes of beautiful writing -- deer described as "tender-faced ruminants," leaves as "chewed to lace by Japanese beetles," a car's tight turn as a "slur." But a horrific percentage of the book consists of stuff like "Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its mingled cruelty and tenderness" and "How much of summer is over before it begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death" and "This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet."

Not to mention whole reams of sentences with so many modifiers -- "The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs" -- or so much subordination -- "As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, moved in" -- and such heavy alliteration -- "The broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter" -- that they seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.

Besides distracting us with worries about whether Mr. Updike might be injured or ill, the turgidity of the prose also increases our dislike of the novel's narrator (it's hard to like a guy whose way of saying his wife doesn't like going to bed before him is "She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile succession of steps whereby consciousness dissolves"). This dislike absolutely torpedoes Toward the End of Time, a novel whose tragic climax (in a late chapter called "The Deaths") is a prostate operation that leaves Turnbull impotent and extremely bummed. It is made very clear that the author expects us to sympathize with and even share Turnbull's grief at "the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures [have] made of my beloved genitals."

David Foster Wallace pwing in Wii Tennis

These demands on our compassion echo the major crisis of the book's first half, described in a flashback, where we are supposed to empathize not only with the textbookish existential dread that hits Turnbull at 30 as he's in his basement building a dollhouse for his daughter -- "I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die. There was no God, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile" -- but also with Turnbull's relief at discovering a remedy for this dread -- "an affair, my first. Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time."

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he's such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what's been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author's recent characters. It's not that Turnbull is stupid -- he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It's that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair.

And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike -- he makes it plain that he views the narrator's impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I'm not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

__________

* Unless, of course, you consider constructing long encomiums to a woman's "sacred several-lipped gateway" or saying things like "It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace" to be the same as loving her.

David Foster Wallace died in 2008.

"Welcome to Heartbreak" - Max Justus (mp3)

"Heartless" - Max Justus (mp3)

"Coldest Winter" - Max Justus (mp3)

"Say You Will" - Max Justus (mp3)