News travels slowly around here, so it took two years for me to discover, courtesy of the Internet, a top ten list of novels assembled by the author of a book called, wait for it, “The Top 10.” The author, J. Peder Zane, polled 125 world-renowned authors, including Tom Wolfe, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon and others, and asked them to name a personal top 10 list. Their lists was then squeezed through whatever weird algorithm of literature was at Zane’s disposal and out popped a master list.
As you might guess, Shakespeare comes out well represented among the individual author suggestions, as does William Faulkner and Henry James. A few of our authors, such as the late Wallace, decided to have fun with their lists. Wallace stuck C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” Stephen King's “The Stand " and Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears,” on his hit parade. This clearly gave the author of the Time magazine article I read hives.
The big time, tip top list that emerges is:
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
A few thoughts:
This isn’t my personal top ten, but mine might look a little similar. I’ve read half of these, I think - my uncertainty comes in that I’ve read some of the stories of Anton Chekhov, though there are several collections. And strictly speaking, “Hamlet” is a play, so it’s inclusion here is somewhat problematic. (I will say that if it wasn’t here, I would be ready to grab a sword.) One wonders why nothing from the whole of Dickens made the list, (perhaps a problem picking one representative work) and I might have expected something from Joyce though that’s only because of his appearance on similar lists. We have three Russians, two Americans, two English writers (and only one woman), and two Frenchmen. Only Count Tolstoy gets a repeat performance, and only he would deserve it.
What also stands out is that one can assume from a few of these titles that adultery makes for the ripping good beginnings of a plot. At least seven contain one extramarital affair, and most of the action in these books hinges on one. (Of course, in “Hamlet,” the affair is implied as having happened before the action of the play.) That leaves Huck Finn and Marcel as the adventuring boys who stand out, one going down the Mississippi and the other venturing into one of the longest multi-volume fictional works in history. Find out for yourself which one had it easier.
But what is more - nearly all of them involve some form of deception - a character concealing his or her true nature or identity in order to either exact revenge or leapfrog status. Figures outwardly do that which is most loathsome to themselves - or are liberated to act as never before - in order not to be discovered. The humiliation, or realization, that results from their lives can terrify, inform, and inspire us into hoping nothing similar happens in our own personal stories.
We see the thing we would avoid, and we inevitably fall into it, despite our worst fears and our best intentions. Conflict is the stuff of fiction, and the stuff of our lives, until we close the books.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
It took Leo Tolstoy more than 1,000 pages to give an imaginary tapestry to the same question it takes Thornton Wilder barely 100 pages to quickly sketch: How much control do human beings have over their own lives, and how do those lives touch one another?
Granted, “War and Peace” is epic storytelling, and perhaps the greatest novel ever written. But whereas Tolstoy’s magnum opus tries to supply an answer, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” merely poses the question in such a way that two different readers can come away with vastly different ideas about what the author intends, and what the answer may be.
Five people are killed on a July day in 1714 while crossing an Inca bridge in Peru when it suddenly collapses. The event is spectacular enough to be called an act of God, and one of its witnesses is a man of God, the monk Brother Juniper. He begins an investigation into the lives of the five victims, believing he can scientifically pour over the events of each life and determine whether there is a divine plan at work in their deaths, or whether it was merely an accident, as some say existence itself is. Were these people innocent victims of a random accident, children called home by God, or were they being punished for the wrongs of a lifetime? The imagery is both obvious and ingenious - a bridge spanning a great abyss, with lives looking out into the expanse and hoping to make it to the other side intact.
As Wilder himself explained, “Strict Puritans imagine God all too easily as a petty schoolmaster who minutely weights guilt against merit, and they overlook God’s Caritas’ which is more all-encompassing and powerful. God’s love has to transcend his just retribution.”
Notice that the entire exercise, at least from the author’s point of view, presupposes the existence of God. Indeed, Christianity hangs over the events of the novel in both its cultural presence and the absence of it, felt in the individual lives. There is the Marquesa de Montemayor, a manipulative woman who covets the lost love of her daughter and only wants to begin her life again with a servant girl to watch over; Estaban, a suicidal man still mourning the loss of his twin brother; and Uncle Pio, a wandering cad who perishes along with the young son of his theatrical protégé, a boy he hopes to educate.
The victims inevitably shared connections with each other through characters both inside and outside the church. Almost all of them, as is said of Pio’s young actress, thought they “were going to be happy forever.” But the individual weight of their lives puts them in motion, inevitably toward the doomed bridge. And the misfortune isn’t over after the bridge collapses. The survivors must cope with the missing lives in their worlds, and even Brother Juniper’s investigations into their lives leads to both he and his book being burned by the Inquisition.
Throughout the story, one of the recurring motifs is that of the stars - impassive witnesses to the follies of mankind. One can look at the sky and see either the hand of God or the insignificance of mankind. And some see both, though those who do not believe look on the heavens and long for an affirmation of some reason behind the seemingly random. Another image reiterated is that of the ungrateful child who shuns a parental figure to exert some measure of control over his or her life, leaving the parent (or surrogate) to grieve like the shepherd for a lost sheep.
Wilder said many years later that people of faith found the book to be an affirmation, while those without it remarked at the book’s unblinking despair. That is a testament to the book's objective power, written in an almost King Jamesian style yet lacking a self-important or overly wise tone. Wilder said he considered himself part of the second group of readers who found despair in the book, but that sometimes he felt closer to the first. It’s interesting that one of his inspirations for the story came from the Gospels in Luke 13:
“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."
This is not usually the stuff of Sunday School class, with Jesus breathing fire at the punishment awaiting those who sin. We prefer the open handed Jesus, welcoming, heart full of love. One of the book’s obvious messages is that people die, and we attach meanings to their passing that may or may not be true, but help us, the survivors, to cope. Jesus’ words remind us that only God’s meaning, inscrutable as it may be, should be sought for one's life, since it is the only meaning worth considering. Skeptics may be moved to say, “Tell that to Brother Juniper.” His message from the scaffold would doubtless be, “Maybe you’re better off not seeking a meaning at all.”
And maybe that is more of a consolation, that answers to life’s agonizing questions are better sought elsewhere than in looking for our fathers in the dust. The book’s closing offers both questions and consolation, so much so that Tony Blair quoted it when remembering the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks:
“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough…There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Granted, “War and Peace” is epic storytelling, and perhaps the greatest novel ever written. But whereas Tolstoy’s magnum opus tries to supply an answer, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” merely poses the question in such a way that two different readers can come away with vastly different ideas about what the author intends, and what the answer may be.
Five people are killed on a July day in 1714 while crossing an Inca bridge in Peru when it suddenly collapses. The event is spectacular enough to be called an act of God, and one of its witnesses is a man of God, the monk Brother Juniper. He begins an investigation into the lives of the five victims, believing he can scientifically pour over the events of each life and determine whether there is a divine plan at work in their deaths, or whether it was merely an accident, as some say existence itself is. Were these people innocent victims of a random accident, children called home by God, or were they being punished for the wrongs of a lifetime? The imagery is both obvious and ingenious - a bridge spanning a great abyss, with lives looking out into the expanse and hoping to make it to the other side intact.
As Wilder himself explained, “Strict Puritans imagine God all too easily as a petty schoolmaster who minutely weights guilt against merit, and they overlook God’s Caritas’ which is more all-encompassing and powerful. God’s love has to transcend his just retribution.”
Notice that the entire exercise, at least from the author’s point of view, presupposes the existence of God. Indeed, Christianity hangs over the events of the novel in both its cultural presence and the absence of it, felt in the individual lives. There is the Marquesa de Montemayor, a manipulative woman who covets the lost love of her daughter and only wants to begin her life again with a servant girl to watch over; Estaban, a suicidal man still mourning the loss of his twin brother; and Uncle Pio, a wandering cad who perishes along with the young son of his theatrical protégé, a boy he hopes to educate.
The victims inevitably shared connections with each other through characters both inside and outside the church. Almost all of them, as is said of Pio’s young actress, thought they “were going to be happy forever.” But the individual weight of their lives puts them in motion, inevitably toward the doomed bridge. And the misfortune isn’t over after the bridge collapses. The survivors must cope with the missing lives in their worlds, and even Brother Juniper’s investigations into their lives leads to both he and his book being burned by the Inquisition.
Throughout the story, one of the recurring motifs is that of the stars - impassive witnesses to the follies of mankind. One can look at the sky and see either the hand of God or the insignificance of mankind. And some see both, though those who do not believe look on the heavens and long for an affirmation of some reason behind the seemingly random. Another image reiterated is that of the ungrateful child who shuns a parental figure to exert some measure of control over his or her life, leaving the parent (or surrogate) to grieve like the shepherd for a lost sheep.
Wilder said many years later that people of faith found the book to be an affirmation, while those without it remarked at the book’s unblinking despair. That is a testament to the book's objective power, written in an almost King Jamesian style yet lacking a self-important or overly wise tone. Wilder said he considered himself part of the second group of readers who found despair in the book, but that sometimes he felt closer to the first. It’s interesting that one of his inspirations for the story came from the Gospels in Luke 13:
“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."
This is not usually the stuff of Sunday School class, with Jesus breathing fire at the punishment awaiting those who sin. We prefer the open handed Jesus, welcoming, heart full of love. One of the book’s obvious messages is that people die, and we attach meanings to their passing that may or may not be true, but help us, the survivors, to cope. Jesus’ words remind us that only God’s meaning, inscrutable as it may be, should be sought for one's life, since it is the only meaning worth considering. Skeptics may be moved to say, “Tell that to Brother Juniper.” His message from the scaffold would doubtless be, “Maybe you’re better off not seeking a meaning at all.”
And maybe that is more of a consolation, that answers to life’s agonizing questions are better sought elsewhere than in looking for our fathers in the dust. The book’s closing offers both questions and consolation, so much so that Tony Blair quoted it when remembering the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks:
“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough…There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Set Your Fields on Fire
The award-winning novel by William Thornton
Available now
Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"
You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.
It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast.
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book.
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here.
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast.
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book.
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here.
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.
Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.
This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Salman Rushdie: Found in Translation
Yesterday Sir Salman Rushdie gave a lecture at Emory University on adaptation - specifically the process of transforming a book into a movie, but also stage, opera, musical, etc. It was a typically illuminating talk from Rushdie, who is a visiting scholar at Emory after allowing his private papers to be housed there.
We live in an era of easy adaptation between the media, he said, with differing results. “Good movies are remade as bad movies. Bad movies get remade as worse movies.” It results, he said, in “a culture that endlessly cannibalizes itself” until we are all swallowed up in the maw.
There were a few surprises in his remarks, perhaps the most surprising that Rushdie hated “Slumdog Millionaire,” (“piles impossibility on impossibility”) while still predicting several hours ahead of time that it would sweep most of its nominated categories at the Academy Awards. He also revealed he had been asked to appear on “Dancing With the Stars,” but declined, fearing it would be a “career ending move.”
The process of adaptation, he said, is determining what is essential in a work and then capturing its essence in a new medium. After a few minutes, though, Rushdie made a few steps in a metaphysical direction, speaking of adaptation in terms of the transition from life to death - “human beings migrating across frontiers.” This is a natural transition for Rushdie, whose novels have always dealt with issues of the immigrant, the fish out of water, the mind finding its way in unfamiliar territory.
When we determine what the essential is in our lives, he said, “life has a way of making us rethink.” Then we adapt to whatever changes happen, to find “the thing that keeps us going.”
Rushdie, of course, has made it clear on several occasions that he has no religion, be it Muslim, Hindu, Christian or otherwise. In fact, he drew an obvious parallel with natural selection - how when animals adapt into new species, what is essential remains. But he did not give in to the temptation to marginalize the religious instinct in his remarks, speaking of the challenge of adapting to a new life or holding to beliefs and risking the label as an “outsider.”
“These are the oldest questions - who are we? How shall we live?” he said. He drew a contrast between those who become rigid in old beliefs with those who “do not know who they are.” There are things which cannot be compromised without losing the essence.
It’s worth noting that Rushdie, as he gave these remarks, was one week removed from the 20th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on him for writing “The Satanic Verses.” After a period of exile, Rushdie has emerged to become perhaps the world’s most famous author, an international personality who has appeared in movies, co-written a song with U2, and is sought out for his opinion on issues both east and west. Yet curiously, his fame derives not from his words but from the effect his words have had on others. Most people, it is safe to say, have limited or no exposure to his novels. The man sitting next to me at the lecture had to ask me, for example, what Rushdie was famous for.
Yet, he has adapted not only to fame but also living 20 years under a death sentence which technically cannot be suspended. He has responded with a life of investigation, no small amount of courage, and humor. There is a lesson for us. Christians are instructed to live their lives with the certain knowledge that we entered the world under a death sentence, yet Christ saved us. We are to live our lives seeking out His will and others to share Him with. We are to abandon fear in light of His redemptive power, and be a light to those around us. Though something will ultimately be lost of us when our lives are over, what will be gained in the translation will be, strangely enough, incomprehensible.
The power of adaptation, across cultures, across lives, across existence, is a story worth telling.
We live in an era of easy adaptation between the media, he said, with differing results. “Good movies are remade as bad movies. Bad movies get remade as worse movies.” It results, he said, in “a culture that endlessly cannibalizes itself” until we are all swallowed up in the maw.
There were a few surprises in his remarks, perhaps the most surprising that Rushdie hated “Slumdog Millionaire,” (“piles impossibility on impossibility”) while still predicting several hours ahead of time that it would sweep most of its nominated categories at the Academy Awards. He also revealed he had been asked to appear on “Dancing With the Stars,” but declined, fearing it would be a “career ending move.”
The process of adaptation, he said, is determining what is essential in a work and then capturing its essence in a new medium. After a few minutes, though, Rushdie made a few steps in a metaphysical direction, speaking of adaptation in terms of the transition from life to death - “human beings migrating across frontiers.” This is a natural transition for Rushdie, whose novels have always dealt with issues of the immigrant, the fish out of water, the mind finding its way in unfamiliar territory.
When we determine what the essential is in our lives, he said, “life has a way of making us rethink.” Then we adapt to whatever changes happen, to find “the thing that keeps us going.”
Rushdie, of course, has made it clear on several occasions that he has no religion, be it Muslim, Hindu, Christian or otherwise. In fact, he drew an obvious parallel with natural selection - how when animals adapt into new species, what is essential remains. But he did not give in to the temptation to marginalize the religious instinct in his remarks, speaking of the challenge of adapting to a new life or holding to beliefs and risking the label as an “outsider.”
“These are the oldest questions - who are we? How shall we live?” he said. He drew a contrast between those who become rigid in old beliefs with those who “do not know who they are.” There are things which cannot be compromised without losing the essence.
It’s worth noting that Rushdie, as he gave these remarks, was one week removed from the 20th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on him for writing “The Satanic Verses.” After a period of exile, Rushdie has emerged to become perhaps the world’s most famous author, an international personality who has appeared in movies, co-written a song with U2, and is sought out for his opinion on issues both east and west. Yet curiously, his fame derives not from his words but from the effect his words have had on others. Most people, it is safe to say, have limited or no exposure to his novels. The man sitting next to me at the lecture had to ask me, for example, what Rushdie was famous for.
Yet, he has adapted not only to fame but also living 20 years under a death sentence which technically cannot be suspended. He has responded with a life of investigation, no small amount of courage, and humor. There is a lesson for us. Christians are instructed to live their lives with the certain knowledge that we entered the world under a death sentence, yet Christ saved us. We are to live our lives seeking out His will and others to share Him with. We are to abandon fear in light of His redemptive power, and be a light to those around us. Though something will ultimately be lost of us when our lives are over, what will be gained in the translation will be, strangely enough, incomprehensible.
The power of adaptation, across cultures, across lives, across existence, is a story worth telling.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Serve the People! By Yan Lianke
One trait of dystopian novels - We, Anthem, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale - is the idea that certain behavior is out of bounds in a dictatorship. Certain images, words, books become sacred, and there is a corresponding need to outlaw other images, words and books. In the era of politics as a surrogate for religion, such a thing becomes even more vital. To control the behavior of its citizens, the state has to control thought - and since the mass production of information began, images stand in for thoughts.
Serve the People! was one of many slogans of Mao’s Chinese government, and is the ironic title of this underground novel from Communist China. It follows Wu Dawang, a Red Army soldier who soon finds himself involved with Liu Lian, the wife of a division commander. Wu Dawang is only an orderly in a sleepy little post in Mao’s China, but in the arms of his mistress, he becomes for just a few sweet moments a man of power.
This shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to anyone who has read “1984.” In a repressive culture, illicit sex becomes a way to express subversive behavior. Usually in books of this type, it’s the main vehicle for the hero - or heroine - to realize just how stultifying their life has become. Sex is a threat to order, and in a repressive society, even the most private behavior can break faith with the state. In this novel, the twist is Liu Lian uses the communist apparatus to her advantage. In a house strewn with revolutionary slogans, the most prominent is the Chairman’s directive to “Serve the people!” Wu Dawang learns that when Liu Lian wants a rendezvous, she uses the sign. He must serve her, “the people.”
What’s interesting is how the state co-opts even the highest ideals of human civilization, twisting them:
“’What,’ he asked, ‘is the first, and only principle of Serving the People?’
‘To serve others as you would wish to be served yourself,’ Wu Dawang replied.
‘How do we give our lives meaning?’
‘By bringing glory to the enterprise of Serving the People every day of our lives and by devoting ourselves as absolutely to serving the needy as a son should devote himself to serving his parents.’”
Pretty words, the political instructor tells Wu Dawang, though he dislikes the parent analogy. Of course. There is no parent other than the state. In the end, Wu is only saying what he thinks the state wants to hear. It doesn’t matter that it’s the golden rule. Serving the people is saving your skin. As is said later, “the meek shall inherit the Revolution.” Everything is collective, all suffering together.
The affair continues, as it must. And yet, this is the sum of Communism - or any totalitarian movement that subverts life - every institution inevitably becomes corrupted. When Wu realizes what fate awaits him when the affair is inevitably discovered, he momentarily thinks of killing her. Both of them realize that deep within them is anger - rage looking for a direction, though neither knows where it comes from nor why it touches every aspect of their lives. “Wu Dawang, we’ve become animals,” Liu says.
Wu and Liu discover the depth and source of their anger when she maneuvers him into accidentally destroying the bust of the Chairman - “an accident of incalculable counter-revolutionary enormity.” And yet, the two of them begin rampaging through the house, destroying anything having to do with the state - pictures of Mao, slogans, yet they stop short, just before Liu is set to smash the Serve the People! sign.
Wu’s marriage - as well as Liu’s - is a lie, but then, everything is in the world of this novel. How far is it from our world? Not politically, but morally. For the Christian, sin is slavery, not freedom. Yet in a sinful state apparatus, virtually everything is colored with sin - either morally or politically. Every lie becomes deeper, until even the truth we must have to survive seems like a lie. In a world where the only meaning comes from an illicit love affair, what ultimate meaning is there? But how different is that from life in any government, even one with absolute freedom?
The truths we cling to - apart from the Eternal - are so many icons, waiting to be smashed.
Serve the People! was one of many slogans of Mao’s Chinese government, and is the ironic title of this underground novel from Communist China. It follows Wu Dawang, a Red Army soldier who soon finds himself involved with Liu Lian, the wife of a division commander. Wu Dawang is only an orderly in a sleepy little post in Mao’s China, but in the arms of his mistress, he becomes for just a few sweet moments a man of power.
This shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to anyone who has read “1984.” In a repressive culture, illicit sex becomes a way to express subversive behavior. Usually in books of this type, it’s the main vehicle for the hero - or heroine - to realize just how stultifying their life has become. Sex is a threat to order, and in a repressive society, even the most private behavior can break faith with the state. In this novel, the twist is Liu Lian uses the communist apparatus to her advantage. In a house strewn with revolutionary slogans, the most prominent is the Chairman’s directive to “Serve the people!” Wu Dawang learns that when Liu Lian wants a rendezvous, she uses the sign. He must serve her, “the people.”
What’s interesting is how the state co-opts even the highest ideals of human civilization, twisting them:
“’What,’ he asked, ‘is the first, and only principle of Serving the People?’
‘To serve others as you would wish to be served yourself,’ Wu Dawang replied.
‘How do we give our lives meaning?’
‘By bringing glory to the enterprise of Serving the People every day of our lives and by devoting ourselves as absolutely to serving the needy as a son should devote himself to serving his parents.’”
Pretty words, the political instructor tells Wu Dawang, though he dislikes the parent analogy. Of course. There is no parent other than the state. In the end, Wu is only saying what he thinks the state wants to hear. It doesn’t matter that it’s the golden rule. Serving the people is saving your skin. As is said later, “the meek shall inherit the Revolution.” Everything is collective, all suffering together.
The affair continues, as it must. And yet, this is the sum of Communism - or any totalitarian movement that subverts life - every institution inevitably becomes corrupted. When Wu realizes what fate awaits him when the affair is inevitably discovered, he momentarily thinks of killing her. Both of them realize that deep within them is anger - rage looking for a direction, though neither knows where it comes from nor why it touches every aspect of their lives. “Wu Dawang, we’ve become animals,” Liu says.
Wu and Liu discover the depth and source of their anger when she maneuvers him into accidentally destroying the bust of the Chairman - “an accident of incalculable counter-revolutionary enormity.” And yet, the two of them begin rampaging through the house, destroying anything having to do with the state - pictures of Mao, slogans, yet they stop short, just before Liu is set to smash the Serve the People! sign.
Wu’s marriage - as well as Liu’s - is a lie, but then, everything is in the world of this novel. How far is it from our world? Not politically, but morally. For the Christian, sin is slavery, not freedom. Yet in a sinful state apparatus, virtually everything is colored with sin - either morally or politically. Every lie becomes deeper, until even the truth we must have to survive seems like a lie. In a world where the only meaning comes from an illicit love affair, what ultimate meaning is there? But how different is that from life in any government, even one with absolute freedom?
The truths we cling to - apart from the Eternal - are so many icons, waiting to be smashed.
Set Your Fields on Fire
The award-winning novel by William Thornton
Available now
Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"
You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.
It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast.
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book.
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here.
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast.
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book.
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here.
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.
Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.
This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Why a graphic novel? Not every graphic novel makes Time Magazine’s 100 best novels list, and there’s room for debate about that list anyway. A much longer argument could take place about whether graphic novels - basically comic books, don’t kid yourselves - belong in any discussion of literature, since they technically qualify as a different medium. The question of how much power the words would have without the pictures is in the same ballpark with that endless discussion of how good a poet Bob Dylan would be considered if he didn’t set his verse to music. But we obviously digress.
For the record, “Watchmen” isn’t my favorite Alan Moore work - that distinction would belong to “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” a work dense and pleasing enough to satisfy after several readings. However, “Watchmen” is on tap for an eagerly awaited motion picture, and worth a look because of what it says about the nature of power and relationships.
“Watchmen” takes several tropes of the superhero genre and turns them inside out. The Watchmen is a group of costumed crime fighters like any other one might remember from a shared multi-media childhood. At a glance, some of them look slightly familiar - the Nite Owl resembles the Batman (Adam West vintage, given his middle-aged paunch) in hardware, though the masked Rorschach mimics the Caped Crusader’s dark vengeance.
But Watchmen isn’t about the reunion of a superhero group to fight some common evil. The only time the reader sees them together is in flashback, or on the cover illustration showing them all in some idealized past. Their heyday is over, and it’s at this point that the story starts.
Part of the genius of this book - and it is pure storytelling genius - is that everything that should normally be familiar in a comic book fantasy is rendered nearly unrecognizable. After only a few pages, one realizes immediately that the Watchmen is how a superhero group would be if such a thing existed - outsize egos, ancient grudges over real and imagined slights - in short, human, all-too-human ambition, naked and uncompromising. Imagine your favorite legendary rock group with unlimited power, carrying into combat all their old, selfish wounds.
The Comedian is the least funny of the group, and the catalyst for the journey the heroes make. The Nite Owl seems like an eccentric man with a curious hobby. The Silk Spectre, a heroine forced into “the business” as her legacy, flits between affairs as though looking for the father she never had. Ozymandias has cashed in on his past. Dr. Manhattan, the most powerful of the group, has grown detached from the affairs of men. Rorschach, haunted by the past, is determined to learn the truth at the brink of sanity, indeed to find any kind of truth.
Moore fleshes out each character and creates the towering personas, retracing their steps through a dystopian America (readers of Moore’s other dystopia, “V for Vendetta,” will recognize his anarchist sensibilities) and making you mourn the association they used to have - one which we are denied witnessing. Each hero is rendered less heroic and more human, more approachable and less sympathetic. And the heroes confront that question that predates the comic book - who am I? Am I who I grew up as, or what I grew to be?
Why do our costumed heroes fight in our stead? We know the familiar origins - Superman is a visitor from another world; Batman, an orphan; Spiderman, the wimp rendered omnipotent - but these “origins” only serve us as a catalyst. Only rarely do we see the hero question the quest, when crime, lawlessness and sin continue.
Costumed heroes were invented to give children and adults the surrogates for their deepest fantasies of power and empowerment - we all want to knock the block off the man keeping us down. That fantasy takes many forms - the man of shadows, the merciless killer, the hero living by his wits, the conjurer with gadgets, the discoverer of the dark secret, the captain of industry, the woman of power and beauty, the god on the mountaintop. We want to be them - or secretly, the one opposing them, just as we secretly pick which side we fight on each day. You gotta serve somebody, the aforementioned Mr. Dylan once reminded us, be it the devil or the Lord. And true to form, the villain is always closer to home, much closer than some external force that comes to destroy. The rot always begins within, Moore reminds us.
But as with all power, it corrupts, it changes, it curdles in the belly. Moore's heroes are filled with the kind of self-loathing we expect from our celebrities. And as the heroes are denied the chance to be themselves, (superheroes are either working for the government or have been driven underground) we see them doing what any normal person would do when they are denied their passion. The passions become aimless, and turn within.
As I said, this is not a conventional novel. Big deal, though. Along the way, the reader is also treated to several stories within stories, such as a pirate-themed tale and various prose pieces. These couldn’t have occurred in a novel. And "Watchmen" has had a decidedly dark effect on the comic book world, as Moore himself has observed. Everyone is trying to "out cool" each other by paying attention to the sordid world the heroes are trying to clean up, and the various writers and artists seem only too happy when the heroes inevitably fail. It has also given birth to an entire generation of politically charged comic fiction which shows the unfortunate limitations of the genre. It's hard to take seriously agitprop in tights. I did find myself slightly disappointed by the end of "Watchmen," but that is a testament to the quality of what led up to it.
But “Watchmen” shows us one of the possible futures of storytelling, though it is by no means the only future. And Gibbons’ art perfectly complements the moment when Dr. Manhattan, conversing with his unfaithful wife on the surface of Mars, contemplates the nature of life:
“But..if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle…” Silk Spectre says, “I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!”
“Yes. Anybody in the world. …But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget…I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”
For the record, “Watchmen” isn’t my favorite Alan Moore work - that distinction would belong to “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” a work dense and pleasing enough to satisfy after several readings. However, “Watchmen” is on tap for an eagerly awaited motion picture, and worth a look because of what it says about the nature of power and relationships.
“Watchmen” takes several tropes of the superhero genre and turns them inside out. The Watchmen is a group of costumed crime fighters like any other one might remember from a shared multi-media childhood. At a glance, some of them look slightly familiar - the Nite Owl resembles the Batman (Adam West vintage, given his middle-aged paunch) in hardware, though the masked Rorschach mimics the Caped Crusader’s dark vengeance.
But Watchmen isn’t about the reunion of a superhero group to fight some common evil. The only time the reader sees them together is in flashback, or on the cover illustration showing them all in some idealized past. Their heyday is over, and it’s at this point that the story starts.
Part of the genius of this book - and it is pure storytelling genius - is that everything that should normally be familiar in a comic book fantasy is rendered nearly unrecognizable. After only a few pages, one realizes immediately that the Watchmen is how a superhero group would be if such a thing existed - outsize egos, ancient grudges over real and imagined slights - in short, human, all-too-human ambition, naked and uncompromising. Imagine your favorite legendary rock group with unlimited power, carrying into combat all their old, selfish wounds.
The Comedian is the least funny of the group, and the catalyst for the journey the heroes make. The Nite Owl seems like an eccentric man with a curious hobby. The Silk Spectre, a heroine forced into “the business” as her legacy, flits between affairs as though looking for the father she never had. Ozymandias has cashed in on his past. Dr. Manhattan, the most powerful of the group, has grown detached from the affairs of men. Rorschach, haunted by the past, is determined to learn the truth at the brink of sanity, indeed to find any kind of truth.
Moore fleshes out each character and creates the towering personas, retracing their steps through a dystopian America (readers of Moore’s other dystopia, “V for Vendetta,” will recognize his anarchist sensibilities) and making you mourn the association they used to have - one which we are denied witnessing. Each hero is rendered less heroic and more human, more approachable and less sympathetic. And the heroes confront that question that predates the comic book - who am I? Am I who I grew up as, or what I grew to be?
Why do our costumed heroes fight in our stead? We know the familiar origins - Superman is a visitor from another world; Batman, an orphan; Spiderman, the wimp rendered omnipotent - but these “origins” only serve us as a catalyst. Only rarely do we see the hero question the quest, when crime, lawlessness and sin continue.
Costumed heroes were invented to give children and adults the surrogates for their deepest fantasies of power and empowerment - we all want to knock the block off the man keeping us down. That fantasy takes many forms - the man of shadows, the merciless killer, the hero living by his wits, the conjurer with gadgets, the discoverer of the dark secret, the captain of industry, the woman of power and beauty, the god on the mountaintop. We want to be them - or secretly, the one opposing them, just as we secretly pick which side we fight on each day. You gotta serve somebody, the aforementioned Mr. Dylan once reminded us, be it the devil or the Lord. And true to form, the villain is always closer to home, much closer than some external force that comes to destroy. The rot always begins within, Moore reminds us.
But as with all power, it corrupts, it changes, it curdles in the belly. Moore's heroes are filled with the kind of self-loathing we expect from our celebrities. And as the heroes are denied the chance to be themselves, (superheroes are either working for the government or have been driven underground) we see them doing what any normal person would do when they are denied their passion. The passions become aimless, and turn within.
As I said, this is not a conventional novel. Big deal, though. Along the way, the reader is also treated to several stories within stories, such as a pirate-themed tale and various prose pieces. These couldn’t have occurred in a novel. And "Watchmen" has had a decidedly dark effect on the comic book world, as Moore himself has observed. Everyone is trying to "out cool" each other by paying attention to the sordid world the heroes are trying to clean up, and the various writers and artists seem only too happy when the heroes inevitably fail. It has also given birth to an entire generation of politically charged comic fiction which shows the unfortunate limitations of the genre. It's hard to take seriously agitprop in tights. I did find myself slightly disappointed by the end of "Watchmen," but that is a testament to the quality of what led up to it.
But “Watchmen” shows us one of the possible futures of storytelling, though it is by no means the only future. And Gibbons’ art perfectly complements the moment when Dr. Manhattan, conversing with his unfaithful wife on the surface of Mars, contemplates the nature of life:
“But..if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle…” Silk Spectre says, “I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!”
“Yes. Anybody in the world. …But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget…I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
John Updike: 1932-2009
When John Updike died last month of lung cancer, I saw this quote from an interview where he described his most famous creation, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom:
"He is...a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important."
I thought perhaps those words might also describe the author. I've read 18 of Updike's novels, including all of the Rabbit cycle, all of the Bech books, and various other novels from his considerable career. At some point in the future, I'll write more about my favorite novel of his, "In the Beauty of the Lilies." Updike was many things - miraculous prose stylist, keen observer of modern life, and indefatigably prolific. But we touch on him here because of the reoccurrence of Christian themes over the course of his work. To go any further frankly would require several pages and several years.
In "Too Far To Go," Updike's wonderful series of short stories about the Maples, a couple whose marriage is collapsing, comes the line: “Ah God, dear God, tall friend of my childhood, I will never forget you, though they say dreadful things.” This line sums up much of the Christian consciousness of Updike's fiction - the idea of an embattled Christianity surviving in spite of the rationalist, agnostic spirit of the times. Or as the Wall Street Journal observed: "He deplored 'today's easy knowingness and self-protective irony' while gently mocking 'religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social advantage of not existing.'"
In “Roger’s Version,” we see two different sides of Updike’s Christian sensibilities - when one character observes that the devout have a perplexing rudeness about the surety of their beliefs that might offend them were they to encounter it in anybody else. At the same time though, Roger Lambert, the book’s narrator, speaks about Tertullian’s observation that the Resurrection - indeed, the Incarnation - is to be believed precisely because it is - so out of place.
There you have Updike in a nutshell. He is polite, the Yankee reserve that one would expect from a Pennsylvanian who spent most of his life in New York and New England. But on the other hand, he is the scamp who enjoys the mere scandal of Christ’s existence in a world that would rather just move on. This allowed him to capture, like no other author, manifestations of the Almighty in day-to-day routines of his everyman characters. Let's be honest though - there is a mocking sensibility present in Updike's settings, a sort of intellectually aristocratic eye looking down on these "little" people. And yet it is, perhaps, the eye of God, celebrating the little walks in the woods, the routines of the job, the familiarity of the home.
And the sex. Updike lingers lovingly on the sex, too lovingly for some readers. My female friends always remark on Updike's sex scenes, as the years and the novels piled up, as being slightly creepy wishes set to prose. Updike, like Roth, continued to celebrate the social upheavals of the sixties, seventies, eighties, etc. by the quality of adulterous affairs his God-haunted men sought.
A recent entry, "Villages," a good example of his later novels which tended to run together after a certain point. This one melded the rise of computer technology with the ubiquitous educated urbane dude on the prowl for a quick tryst, while the events of American life sail by. A typical sentence might read, “As he unhooked the luscious abundance buried in her bra, he thought of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, OPEC, Reagan, yadda yadda yadda....”
Owen McKenzie’s one-volume life strikes one as a smaller replay of Rabbit Angstrom, Piet Hanema with a little longer time on stage, the same male on the prowl, dancing over hordes of women and obsessing over God, only to be slapped on the wrist, again and again. Oh sure, there are the inevitable moments where the outraged wife, or girlfriend, whoever, rages at the injustice of it all. There’s a breaking up, an abortion, maybe even an accidental death, but the hero is soon restored in the end to pad around the kitchen in search of a snack, trying to stave off contemplation of death and fill that God-shaped hole. “How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women.” The women’s protestations don’t seem so loud, not as loud as the sounds of the lovemaking, so joyous and carefree and endlessly evocative of coral and fruit and whatever other natural adjectives Updike could pile on, to the eye-rolling wonder of the reader.
For myself, the Rabbit books are among my least favorite. "Rabbit Redux" is an embarrassing hodge-podge of sixties stock characters. Even as the books grew in quality, the characters' behavior became steadily more appalling, especially Rabbit himself. My favorite entry is actually his coda, "Rabbit Remembered," which reunites us with all the characters after Rabbit's death as the millennium approaches. One can look at the sins of these characters and for a moment, as I said, envision the eye of God.
The anger or revulsion or frustration we feel for these characters' sins should be counterbalanced when we realize that God Himself finds the same sordid rust accumulating in our own lives and yet somehow finds a way of loving us. The religious aspect of his work though is the most puzzling, since Updike’s faith at times doesn’t seem very lived in as much as observed. I don’t mean that for him personally, but the way his characters are. The ones that stand out are the ones who believe vividly, devoutly, because the rest of them seem so bored with thousands of years of Christendom. One longs for Job’s Jehovah, wrapped in the whirlwind, to suddenly arrive unannounced. But perhaps, Updike longs for Him as well.
From Updike's "The Future of Faith":
"My father...was the son of a minister, but he felt his father had failed in the ministry, having lacked 'the call' and, perhaps accordingly, the necessary devoted energy. Where many fathers - some of them described in late-Victorian novels - conveyed to their sons an oppressive faith that it was a joy to cast off, my father communicated to me, not with words but with his actions and his melancholy, a sense of the Christian religion as something weak and tenuous and in need of rescue. There is a way in which success disagrees with Christianity. Its proper venue is embattlement - a furtive hanging-on in the catacombs or at ill-attended services in dying rural and inner-city parishes. Its perilous, marginal, mocked existence serves as an image of our own, beneath whatever show of success can be momentarily mustered."
I struggle with wanting to agree with this, and not wanting to. In this essay, Updike was commissioned at the turn of the millennium by the New Yorker to argue that faith still has a future. And at times, reading this, I think he pitched it to the intended audience, like a grade schooler at a talent show about to perform a tune he learned on his guitar, sort of embarrassed, secretly hoping to really sell it but giving off a shrug as though, if this fails, he won't be surprised at all. In this estimation, faith in some ways (always the wonderfully vague, inclusive "faith") is just a habit, like smoking a pipe after supper or a worn wool cardigan that one wears because it's familiar, in spite of whatever allure it once might have had. And yet, there is nothing in this excerpt, and indeed, in the entire essay that addresses the fundamental, almost organic need we have to sin, and the same hard-wired agony we put ourselves through over those sins - the sense of being fallen, of needing redemption.
In the essay, Updike tours the old churches and museums of Italy looking at various sculptures and paintings representing the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Christ that stares back from behind his paragraphs is just as flat as the frescoes he sees. There is no attempt to see Jesus - and seemingly no recognition that He can be found in the one place where He said he would be - in the other. No visits to the sick, or those in prison, not even a cup of water for a little one. In one respect, you can almost imagine Updike saying, "I never knew you."
In one sense, he's right - Christianity is embattled, and it always will be in this life. It is the one unbent and unbowed constant, the unmoved mover that continues to bewitch the eastern and western worlds. Christ inspires the Richard Dawkins' and the Billy Grahams, the Stalins and the Churchills, the silent masses and the careful murderers, all in His own way, running to and running away from Him. Perhaps the most dominant image from all of Updike is Piet's catching sight of the church steeple at the end of "Couples" above the smoke and flames.
But to say this ignores perhaps my favorite piece of Updike writing, a poem I once found in a collection edited by Calvin Miller, "The Book of Jesus." In it, Updike, alone among his contemporaries, makes perhaps the most unabashed case for unabashed faith, in all its ramifications:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino
acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable,
a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the
miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
"He is...a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important."
I thought perhaps those words might also describe the author. I've read 18 of Updike's novels, including all of the Rabbit cycle, all of the Bech books, and various other novels from his considerable career. At some point in the future, I'll write more about my favorite novel of his, "In the Beauty of the Lilies." Updike was many things - miraculous prose stylist, keen observer of modern life, and indefatigably prolific. But we touch on him here because of the reoccurrence of Christian themes over the course of his work. To go any further frankly would require several pages and several years.
In "Too Far To Go," Updike's wonderful series of short stories about the Maples, a couple whose marriage is collapsing, comes the line: “Ah God, dear God, tall friend of my childhood, I will never forget you, though they say dreadful things.” This line sums up much of the Christian consciousness of Updike's fiction - the idea of an embattled Christianity surviving in spite of the rationalist, agnostic spirit of the times. Or as the Wall Street Journal observed: "He deplored 'today's easy knowingness and self-protective irony' while gently mocking 'religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social advantage of not existing.'"
In “Roger’s Version,” we see two different sides of Updike’s Christian sensibilities - when one character observes that the devout have a perplexing rudeness about the surety of their beliefs that might offend them were they to encounter it in anybody else. At the same time though, Roger Lambert, the book’s narrator, speaks about Tertullian’s observation that the Resurrection - indeed, the Incarnation - is to be believed precisely because it is - so out of place.
There you have Updike in a nutshell. He is polite, the Yankee reserve that one would expect from a Pennsylvanian who spent most of his life in New York and New England. But on the other hand, he is the scamp who enjoys the mere scandal of Christ’s existence in a world that would rather just move on. This allowed him to capture, like no other author, manifestations of the Almighty in day-to-day routines of his everyman characters. Let's be honest though - there is a mocking sensibility present in Updike's settings, a sort of intellectually aristocratic eye looking down on these "little" people. And yet it is, perhaps, the eye of God, celebrating the little walks in the woods, the routines of the job, the familiarity of the home.
And the sex. Updike lingers lovingly on the sex, too lovingly for some readers. My female friends always remark on Updike's sex scenes, as the years and the novels piled up, as being slightly creepy wishes set to prose. Updike, like Roth, continued to celebrate the social upheavals of the sixties, seventies, eighties, etc. by the quality of adulterous affairs his God-haunted men sought.
A recent entry, "Villages," a good example of his later novels which tended to run together after a certain point. This one melded the rise of computer technology with the ubiquitous educated urbane dude on the prowl for a quick tryst, while the events of American life sail by. A typical sentence might read, “As he unhooked the luscious abundance buried in her bra, he thought of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, OPEC, Reagan, yadda yadda yadda....”
Owen McKenzie’s one-volume life strikes one as a smaller replay of Rabbit Angstrom, Piet Hanema with a little longer time on stage, the same male on the prowl, dancing over hordes of women and obsessing over God, only to be slapped on the wrist, again and again. Oh sure, there are the inevitable moments where the outraged wife, or girlfriend, whoever, rages at the injustice of it all. There’s a breaking up, an abortion, maybe even an accidental death, but the hero is soon restored in the end to pad around the kitchen in search of a snack, trying to stave off contemplation of death and fill that God-shaped hole. “How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women.” The women’s protestations don’t seem so loud, not as loud as the sounds of the lovemaking, so joyous and carefree and endlessly evocative of coral and fruit and whatever other natural adjectives Updike could pile on, to the eye-rolling wonder of the reader.
For myself, the Rabbit books are among my least favorite. "Rabbit Redux" is an embarrassing hodge-podge of sixties stock characters. Even as the books grew in quality, the characters' behavior became steadily more appalling, especially Rabbit himself. My favorite entry is actually his coda, "Rabbit Remembered," which reunites us with all the characters after Rabbit's death as the millennium approaches. One can look at the sins of these characters and for a moment, as I said, envision the eye of God.
The anger or revulsion or frustration we feel for these characters' sins should be counterbalanced when we realize that God Himself finds the same sordid rust accumulating in our own lives and yet somehow finds a way of loving us. The religious aspect of his work though is the most puzzling, since Updike’s faith at times doesn’t seem very lived in as much as observed. I don’t mean that for him personally, but the way his characters are. The ones that stand out are the ones who believe vividly, devoutly, because the rest of them seem so bored with thousands of years of Christendom. One longs for Job’s Jehovah, wrapped in the whirlwind, to suddenly arrive unannounced. But perhaps, Updike longs for Him as well.
From Updike's "The Future of Faith":
"My father...was the son of a minister, but he felt his father had failed in the ministry, having lacked 'the call' and, perhaps accordingly, the necessary devoted energy. Where many fathers - some of them described in late-Victorian novels - conveyed to their sons an oppressive faith that it was a joy to cast off, my father communicated to me, not with words but with his actions and his melancholy, a sense of the Christian religion as something weak and tenuous and in need of rescue. There is a way in which success disagrees with Christianity. Its proper venue is embattlement - a furtive hanging-on in the catacombs or at ill-attended services in dying rural and inner-city parishes. Its perilous, marginal, mocked existence serves as an image of our own, beneath whatever show of success can be momentarily mustered."
I struggle with wanting to agree with this, and not wanting to. In this essay, Updike was commissioned at the turn of the millennium by the New Yorker to argue that faith still has a future. And at times, reading this, I think he pitched it to the intended audience, like a grade schooler at a talent show about to perform a tune he learned on his guitar, sort of embarrassed, secretly hoping to really sell it but giving off a shrug as though, if this fails, he won't be surprised at all. In this estimation, faith in some ways (always the wonderfully vague, inclusive "faith") is just a habit, like smoking a pipe after supper or a worn wool cardigan that one wears because it's familiar, in spite of whatever allure it once might have had. And yet, there is nothing in this excerpt, and indeed, in the entire essay that addresses the fundamental, almost organic need we have to sin, and the same hard-wired agony we put ourselves through over those sins - the sense of being fallen, of needing redemption.
In the essay, Updike tours the old churches and museums of Italy looking at various sculptures and paintings representing the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Christ that stares back from behind his paragraphs is just as flat as the frescoes he sees. There is no attempt to see Jesus - and seemingly no recognition that He can be found in the one place where He said he would be - in the other. No visits to the sick, or those in prison, not even a cup of water for a little one. In one respect, you can almost imagine Updike saying, "I never knew you."
In one sense, he's right - Christianity is embattled, and it always will be in this life. It is the one unbent and unbowed constant, the unmoved mover that continues to bewitch the eastern and western worlds. Christ inspires the Richard Dawkins' and the Billy Grahams, the Stalins and the Churchills, the silent masses and the careful murderers, all in His own way, running to and running away from Him. Perhaps the most dominant image from all of Updike is Piet's catching sight of the church steeple at the end of "Couples" above the smoke and flames.
But to say this ignores perhaps my favorite piece of Updike writing, a poem I once found in a collection edited by Calvin Miller, "The Book of Jesus." In it, Updike, alone among his contemporaries, makes perhaps the most unabashed case for unabashed faith, in all its ramifications:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino
acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable,
a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the
miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
What I Like
If I had to pick a few novels that I’d recommend in a heartbeat, they would have to be, in no particular order (and as only the beginning of a discussion):
“Juneteenth” by Ralph Ellison. He set out to put the American experience all into one book, and even though this is a posthumously published part of an unfinished novel, it’s still pretty doggone close.
“Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust” by Nathaniel West. A teacher in college recommended this book to me, fascinating in itself and makes you wish he’d lived longer and written more.
“The Human Stain” by Philip Roth. This is an awesome book. Everything is a Chinese box, with characters within characters. Everyone’s a stereotype, and yet they’re not. Best American novel written in the last ten years, for me.
Three way tie: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe, “Less Than Zero” by Bret Eason Ellis, “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerney. They’re hyperbolic, manic, mannered, and yet they perfectly sum up a time and a place. And very funny, and appalling, and appallingly funny, and funny because they’re appalling.
“The Dogs of Babel” by Carolyn Parkhurst. I laughed when I heard the premise of this book, chalking it up to the idea that a publisher will print any novel as long as it’s not mine. But I loved this book so much.
“In the Beauty of the Lilies” by John Updike. I loved this book the most of all of his, because it weaves the movies and religion into a rich generational tapestry.
“Shalimar the Clown” by Salman Rushdie. I thoroughly enjoyed this book last year, not just for the story, which was very riveting, but the long prosy riffs he unravels so effortlessly.
“The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway. I read this one afternoon at the river and could smell the wind coming off the Keys. When I finally went to Key West, I felt like I had already been there.
“Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow. He was another that I had to read everything he’d written. This is his best, though “The March” was as good a book as I’ve read in the past five years.
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck. It’s unfortunate that Steinbeck’s critical reputation has fallen down, because this is a wonderful work that unfortunately gets typecast as Depression era agitprop. Instead, it’s ageless, sweeping, and compulsively readable.
And for my money, the greatest American novel ever is “The Great Gatsby.” I wouldn’t have said that necessarily 10 years ago, but I’ve reread it at least three times since then, and it gets better every single time.
“Juneteenth” by Ralph Ellison. He set out to put the American experience all into one book, and even though this is a posthumously published part of an unfinished novel, it’s still pretty doggone close.
“Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust” by Nathaniel West. A teacher in college recommended this book to me, fascinating in itself and makes you wish he’d lived longer and written more.
“The Human Stain” by Philip Roth. This is an awesome book. Everything is a Chinese box, with characters within characters. Everyone’s a stereotype, and yet they’re not. Best American novel written in the last ten years, for me.
Three way tie: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe, “Less Than Zero” by Bret Eason Ellis, “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerney. They’re hyperbolic, manic, mannered, and yet they perfectly sum up a time and a place. And very funny, and appalling, and appallingly funny, and funny because they’re appalling.
“The Dogs of Babel” by Carolyn Parkhurst. I laughed when I heard the premise of this book, chalking it up to the idea that a publisher will print any novel as long as it’s not mine. But I loved this book so much.
“In the Beauty of the Lilies” by John Updike. I loved this book the most of all of his, because it weaves the movies and religion into a rich generational tapestry.
“Shalimar the Clown” by Salman Rushdie. I thoroughly enjoyed this book last year, not just for the story, which was very riveting, but the long prosy riffs he unravels so effortlessly.
“The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway. I read this one afternoon at the river and could smell the wind coming off the Keys. When I finally went to Key West, I felt like I had already been there.
“Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow. He was another that I had to read everything he’d written. This is his best, though “The March” was as good a book as I’ve read in the past five years.
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck. It’s unfortunate that Steinbeck’s critical reputation has fallen down, because this is a wonderful work that unfortunately gets typecast as Depression era agitprop. Instead, it’s ageless, sweeping, and compulsively readable.
And for my money, the greatest American novel ever is “The Great Gatsby.” I wouldn’t have said that necessarily 10 years ago, but I’ve reread it at least three times since then, and it gets better every single time.
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