The Old Devil

Posted 27 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

Jake’s Thing, by Kingsley Amis. Vintage Books, $19.95 paper, 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-099-51217-2.

Jake’s thing is his penis. At fifty-nine years of age Jake’s thing — unlike the seventy-one-year-old Nathan Zuckerman’s thing in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost — still functions effectively. The problem is not one of mechanics, but one of desire. Once a ribald Lothario, Jake has recently lost all interest in sex. Or, as Dr. Rosenberg, the youthful sex therapist to whom Jake is sent for consultation, puts it in a typical Amis exchange:

“Now your trouble is that your libido [lib-eedo] has declined.”

“My what?” asked Jake, though he had understood all right.

“Your libido, your sexual drive.”

“I’m sorry. I’d be inclined to pronounce it lib-ighdo, on the basis that we’re talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it’ll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined.”

Jake is an Oxford don, “Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College,” and as such is one in a line of Amis academics stretching back to his first novel, Lucky Jim. Published in 1954, that novel established Amis’s reputation as a notable prose stylist and is still considered one of the finest examples of postwar British comic writing.

By the time Amis came to publish Jake’s Thing in 1978, much had changed in the world, notably the rise of feminism. The author, who along with his good friend Philip Larkin was a key figure in the group of British postwar writers known as the Movement, had begun to take on the mantle of misogynistic, racist misanthrope that would hound him in throughout his later career. The titular figure in Jake’s Thing, albeit a patently comic character, nevertheless espouses attitudes toward women that were outdated at the time, and that seem positively Neanderthal from the perspective of 2007:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

The passage’s final clause is perhaps meant to indicate ironic distance, to forestall what Philip Roth in Exit Ghost referred to as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.” Thirty years after the publication of Jake’s Thing, however, it is unlikely that any enlightened reader coming across the passage above would not be brought up short by its scabrous dismissal of the female gender as shallow, deceitful, and gormless.

A similar reaction is prompted by Jake’s diatribe during a faculty debate about the merits of admitting women to Comyns College:

No doubt they do think, the youngsters, it’d be more fun to be under the same roof, but who cares what they think? All very well for the women, no doubt, it’s the men who are going to be the losers — oh, it’ll happen all right, no holding it up now. When the first glow has faded and it’s quite normal to have girls in the same building and on the same staircase and across the landing, they’ll start realising that that’s exactly what they’ve got, girls everywhere and not a common-room, not a club, not a pub where they can get away from them. And the same thing’s going to happen to us which is much more important, Roger’s absolutely right, all this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about. So let’s pass a motion suggesting they bugger off back to Somerville, LMH, St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s where they began and stay there. It won’t make any bloody difference but at least we’ll have told ‘em what we think of ‘em.

That Jake is a misogynist should by now be abundantly clear; that his declining libido is inextricably tied to his hatred of women seems likewise inescapable. His genuine tenderness toward his wife, Brenda — whose low self-image locates Jake’s lack of desire in what she perceives to be his distaste for the fact that she is overweight — coupled with his willingness to undergo a series of increasingly embarrassing and degrading sexual “therapy” sessions in an attempt to overcome his problem, is the only counterpoint to his growing notion that the benefits derived from sex are not worth the effort of engaging with women in the first place.

It should be noted at this point that Jake’s Thing is a comic novel. But its comedy is of a distinctly nasty stripe: dark, vicious, calculated to offend. Jake is in many ways a relic of a bygone era — or, at least, of an era that was rapidly waning in the Britain of 1978. Jake is contemptuous of anyone or anything he decides is beneath him, and his derision knows no bounds. He is brutal toward his neighbours Alcestis, whom he refers to privately as “Smudger,” and her husband, Geoffrey, “Christendom’s premier fucking fool”; toward his long-suffering cleaning lady, Mrs. Sharp, who is “born of that mysterious power … of unconsciously sensing how and when and where to be most obstructive and acting on it”; and toward Dr. Rosenberg, “a student of the mind who didn’t know where Freud had come from.” He is likewise suspicious of the “therapeutic” techniques that Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues employ with him, including “sensate focusing” sessions, the viewing of pornography to overcome his guilt and shame in the realm of sex, and a bizarre workshop that involves his ritual humiliation by exposing his genitals to a room full of strangers. It is harder to take umbrage at these satirical jabs, since so many of them still ring true in today’s Dr. Phil besotted culture: “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.”

But by and large, Jake’s Thing is an historical document, a snapshot of a time and a place that no longer exist. This is perhaps one reason why Amis is not more widely read at the close of 2007. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, critic Michael Dirda opines, “a lot of people felt that [Amis’s] books were coldhearted, and certainly no one could deny that the male protagonists were often despicable, no matter how artfully portrayed. Not least, because Amis’s books eschewed formal innovation, they have never held much appeal to literary scholars or classroom teachers.”

Amis was notoriously antithetical to formal innovators such as Joyce or Nabokov, and his novels display none of the structural or linguistic pyrotechnics of those authors. He was, instead, a proponent of clear, crisp, efficient prose, and it is perhaps this very clarity and precision that makes the content of the novels seem that much more untenable to 21st-century readers.

As for being coldhearted and despicable, these adjectives could easily be applied to Jake and to the novel that he inhabits, but these seem less like legitimate literary criticisms and more statements of emotional affect on the part of discomfited readers. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing about despicable characters; it is a peculiar brand of literary philistinism that demands that characters in novels be sympathetic or cleave to a politically correct worldview. Particularly when the novel is placed in its proper historical context, the backward views of its lead character — a British-educated male of a certain age — tend to become more understandable.

None of which is to excuse Jake’s more reactionary or offensive attitudes. It would be a shame, however, if a short-sighted political correctness were ultimately to deny a careful literary artist his rightful place in the pantheon of late 20th-century literature.

One More

Posted 21 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

My review of David Helwig’s novella, Smuggling Donkeys, is online, here.

A Bit of Seasonal Goodness

Posted 21 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

Since it’s the season of goodwill, and given that my encounter with the Giller shortlist might have left all you dedicated TSR readers (both you dedicated TSR readers?) with the impression that I thought this year in CanLit really, well … um … sucked, I thought I’d point you in the direction of two collections of short stories by young Canadian writers that are well worth checking out.

Matt Shaw’s The Obvious Child is a rarity in CanLit: an anti-naturalistic, Borgesian collection of fables and philosophical detective stories. Andrew Hood’s collection, Pardon Our Monsters, is more immediately recognizable vis à vis the CanLit short fiction template, but is nevertheless a strong first collection.

You can find my reviews of both these books online, here.

Downtime at TSR

Posted 21 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

A combination of my frenzied capitulation to the consumerist impulses of the season and my own talent for procrastination has left me with a ton of shopping to get done before I skip town tomorrow for a few days, so posts may be a bit light until after the 25th. I’ll try to get something up here later today, but if I fail in this vain endeavour, please forgive me. It’s only because I’m involved in the Hurculean task of overcoming my misanthropic inner Sartre while battling hordes of frothing, snarling Visigoths in Christmas store lineups. You really wouldn’t want to read me when I’m in such a mood, anyway.

Advice You Can Take to the Bank

Posted 19 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, by Elmore Leonard, illus. by Joe Ciardiello. William Morrow, $17.50 cloth, 92 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-14546-1.

On July 16, 2001, the New York Times published an article entitled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” The article was written by Elmore Leonard, one of the greatest American prose stylists since Hemingway, and it contained his prescription for good writing. Leonard’s ten rules (actually eleven, if you count the last one) should be pasted on the wall of every would-be writer’s workroom. Rule one: “Never open a book with weather.” Rule three: “Never use a verb other than ’said’ to carry dialogue.” Rule nine: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.”

These are admonishments (accompanied by Leonard’s acknowledgement that it’s okay in certain circumstances — and for certain authors — to break the rules) that can’t help but make prose better: cleaner, more direct, more efficient. Over the years I’ve used Leonard’s rules as teaching tools with students and authors I’ve edited, and I’ve employed them — to a greater or lesser degree — in my own writing. Leonard’s NYT article was a brilliant distillation of his theory of writing.

It was also, not incidentally for the current book under discussion, brief. 1,048 words to be exact. Now, while just over one thousand words may be an appropriate length for a newspaper article, it is not clear that it is an appropriate length for a book, even one as sparse as the current volume, which weighs in at a mere ninety-two pages. When I first heard about this book, I assumed that the author would bundle his rules with other pieces of writing, the way Kurt Vonnegut did when he reprinted his (equally useful) rules of writing in his essay collection, Bagombo Snuff Box, which in paperback runs to a more respectable 384 pages. At the very least, I assumed there would be some additional material to augment the original article, particularly given the fact that the article is readily available online in its original form.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing does contain original material in the form of amusing caricatures of writers such as Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, and, of course, Leonard himself.

But the text simply reprints the NYT article, without adding so much as a word. Printed on heavy stock, the layout features pages that often contain only a single sentence, and the text is often awkwardly broken, such that material that was meant to flow together in the newspaper article appears on different pages of the book. The voluminous white space (nearly every verso page is completely blank) is perhaps meant to provide aspiring writers with a place to scribble notes and cavils with the author; to me it just looks like wasted space.

The volume is packaged as a gift book, with a price point that is relatively low for a hardcover edition. Appearing as it does right at Giftmas, when relatives and friends of aspiring writers are going to be searching for appropriate presents to give, this little book might make a suitable stocking stuffer. The advice contained between the covers is worth its weight in gold; but the book’s entire look and feel and raison d’être smacks of little more than a cash grab.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 10

Posted 19 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

Amy Shearn is a Brooklyn-based writer and teacher. Her writing has appeared at Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, the Mississippi Review, and Bookslut, among other places. Her first novel, How Far Is the Ocean from Here, is due for release in January.

Amy Shearn:

I kept putting this off and thinking too much about it because I am indecisive and worry about hurting books’ feelings. These things are so hard! But I think my favourites that came out this year were:

Modern Life, poems by Matthea Harvey

Hotel Theory, by Wayne Koestenbaum

No One Belongs Here More than You, by Miranda July

Famous Fathers, by Pia Z. Ehrhart

Twenty Grand, by Rebecca Curtis

An Absolute Gentleman, by R.M. Kinder.

Books that didn’t come out this year that I happened to read and particularly loved included:

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, by Kathryn Davis

Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, by J.D. Salinger

Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor.

But then, I feel like somehow I didn’t read very much this year, comparatively I mean.  Well, it’s been busy. Also I listened on audiobook to The World Without Us, by Alan Wiseman. I can’t decide if that counts as reading, but at any rate I really enjoyed it.

***

The complete collection of lists can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

Return of the Reluctant Calls It a Day

Posted 18 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Ed Champion, the prodigious litblogger who is the driving force behind Return of the Reluctant, has decided to pull the plug on the blog after four years.

The blog, whose name and inaugural post on December 2, 2003 (along with an accompanying quote from The Godfather, Part III) always did suggest a kind of love/hate relationship with the form, was a mainstay for those of us who troll the literary byways of Web 2.0. Along with his podcast series, The Bat Segundo Show (which Ed assures us will continue), Return of the Reluctant provided a sometimes overwhelming daily dose of literary news, links, and gossip. It was written in an arch, sarcastic style, and was unafraid to criticize mainstream news organs such as the New York Times Book Review (a favourite whipping boy of Champion’s) and Time’s Lev Grossman, who wrote a piece for the magazine entitled “My Mortal Enemy” about Champion.

I was frequently astounded by the sheer amount of material on the site — at times I half believed that Champion employed a platoon of researchers and typists to create and collate the mountains of content that he posted daily — and enjoyed the author’s contrarian (and often ironic and hyperbolic, something his critics were seemingly unable to understand) take on the literary matters of the day.

Ed is leaving the blogosphere (for the moment: he’s done this before, but insists that this time, he’s serious) to devote more time to his journalism and to a novel in progress. TSR thanks him for the enjoyment he’s provided over the last four years, and wishes him all the best in his future endeavours.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 9

Posted 18 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

Today’s list is from Claire Cameron. Claire’s first novel, The Line Painter, was published by HarperCollins Canada in 2007. You can view her author home page and blog here.

Claire Cameron:

Mine, when I look, are a bit strange.

1. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown

If you read a book every night of the year, I think it deserves to be number one. There is something exceptionally graceful about the structure of this children’s book, the way it comes to an end that is satisfying, inevitable, and also slightly unexpected. Or, perhaps the sheer force of repetition makes the heart grow fond?

2. Zeroville, by Steve Erickson

I reviewed this book for the Globe & Mail and likened it to getting smashed over the head with a tray. It reminded me of why I like the music of Joy Division or Interpol: a dispassionate delivery, when done right, can have incredible feeling.

3. Deliverance, by James Dickey

Like most, my memory of this book was superseded by the movie. I went back and reread the book this year. Action aside, I loved Dickey’s quieter descriptions, the tension he creates between characters, and the simple structure. It’s a beautifully crafted book.

4. Twilight of the Superheroes, by Deborah Eisenberg

My agent, Denise Bukowski, recommended this — perhaps she wishes I’d write short stories like Eisenberg? I’m sure she does, because Eisenberg is a master. The stories feel like they grow around you.

5. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

I love the writing of Ian McEwan. I loved this book. I forgive McEwan for a slightly trite ending, because I give always give him whatever slack he needs (I’m thinking of you, Enduring Love).

***

More to come. Check back tomorrow. The complete set of lists can be found by clicking the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 8

Posted 17 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | 3 comments

I’m a bit late posting this, because I’ve been digging out after the mother of all snowstorms. (Or, if not the mother, then the mother-in-law of all snowstorms.) But, better late than never, today’s list of favourite books comes from Panic Girl, a blogger who administers the brilliantly named In the Midst of Life We Are in Debt, Etc. She also administers the Facebook group Douglas Coupland for Prime Minister. (Okay, I made that last bit up.)

Panic Girl:

2007’s been an odd year for me, reading wise, in that it’s the first year I’ve really concentrated on reading mostly new books (thank you Toronto Public Library!).

House of Meetings, by Martin Amis.

I was completely absorbed from the first page. This is the first Amis I’ve read, so I had no idea what to expect from him, though I was aware of the accolades, and the Yellow Dog fallout. I’ve always enjoyed a good family epic, and on that score, Amis doesn’t disappoint. I’ve never been all that interested in Russia, or Russian history, and was actually a bit trepidatious to tackle something partially set in a Siberian work camp. In the end though, I was drawn into the relationship of the brothers, and their lives, in a world very alien, and thus very compelling.

Bottle Rocket Hearts, by Zoe Whittall.

I heard Zoe read an excerpt of her then novel-in-progress in 2003, and I’d been eagerly awaiting it since. I was not disappointed in the least.

I was nineteen when Eve, the main character, was nineteen, and the book created a huge lump of nostalgia and longing in my chest that didn’t go away for some time after I’d finished the book. Zoe knows how to recreate that time, in perfect grimy, glittery detail. One of the few criticisms I’ve read of the book is the attention given to Eve’s fashion choices, but you have to remember that for people that age trying to break free of something, one of the first and best ways they assert themselves is through clothing, and appearance. I thought these details gave the book credibility.

The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland.

When Coupland gets it right, he gets it so very, very right. The lingering, lonely sadness of Eleanor Rigby; postmodern touches that work (rather than distract as they did in J-pod); the awareness of low/pop-culture and how it infiltrates and shapes us … it’s all there. Again, I’d like to respond to a criticism: Coupland takes a lot of flak for the pop-culture stuff, but that’s just elitist thinking. Most people, we unwashed masses, don’t live in a world where only Mozart plays, where only Walden is read, where TVs never existed. I often think in pop-culture references (don’t get me started on how my internal monologue had been hijacked by lolcats), and it’s good, and necessary, to see that reflected in modern literature.

Strange as this Weather Has Been, by Ann Pancake.

A bit of a surprise. I had an advance reading copy, and on reading the back said to myself, “What the hell, I like things set in the South.” Strange as this Weather Has Been details the lives of a poor Virginian family in the shadow of a giant mining operation. Pancake knows what she’s talking about, and doesn’t spare the reader any of the horror of mountaintop removal and strip mining, from the economic impact of the mining companies using nonunion workers, to the ecological changes in the region (tainted water, floods, destruction of forests). While the characters are made up, this isn’t entirely fiction. The conditions described exist, and that’s what’s most horrifying. Strange as this Weather Has Been is the new Southern Gothic, and as chilling as anything Flannery O’Connor ever dreamed up.

Nobody Passes, ed. by Matt Bernstein Sycamore.

This anthology was published at the end of 2006, but I only came to read it this year. The essays are based around the idea that we’re all supposed to want to be the ultimate societal ideal: white, straight, male, wealthy, and able-bodied. So what happens when we’re not one of those things, or any of those things? The writers explore difference, how it can harm, how it can liberate, how difference is important to identity, and how it marks one as a target of scorn, derision, and systemic discrimination. Each essay approaches the topic from a completely different point of view. As I said in my blog, this should be the primer on third-wave feminist thought, since third-wave is very much interested in how different “isms” collide and combine, creating a different experience for individuals.

***

More to come; keep checking back over the next few days. The complete collection can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 7

Posted 16 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 | No comments

Sunday’s list features Sarah Williams, a former editor in the Canadian publishing industry, who inexplicably left all that glamour behind to pursue a Ph.D. in London, England. If you’re an armchair traveller, you can read Sarah’s blog, Something Slant, and become horribly jealous.

Sarah Williams:

I found it a sparse year for good new books. But off the top of my head:

Let Me In, by Mario Testino (Taschen, 2007). Not since Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990 has there been such a spectacularly good celebrity photography book. Sexy, explosive pop culture. In the year Brangelina dominated the news and Britney lost her shit, celebrity culture has never been so relevant.

The Pain and the Itch, by Bruce Norris (Nick Hern Books 2007). Had its U.K. premiere this summer at the Royal Court — even more of a leading theatrical presence since Dominic Cooke became artistic director this year. One of the best depictions of the aspirations and hypocrisies of the middle class that I’ve ever read. And having an entire play centered around a mysteriously gnawed avocado is beyond brilliant.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, 2007). Not the best of his last few novels, but any new Murakami translation is cause for celebration. His novels are seeming to become darker with each passing year, which makes me salivate for the next one. This one was prostitues, pimps, and a comatose girl caught in a surreal bedroom fitted with a flickering television screen that seems to contain an alternate world. What possibly could be next?

To the Wedding, by John Berger (Bloomsbury, 1995). One of the only books I reread each and every year. It’s the book that makes me realize why I read in the first place and the book I wish I had written. Sweeping themes of post-Cold War sensibilities portrayed in a simple story of various family members travelling to celebrate one particular wedding. The tragedy of the situation is indicated at the beginning of the story and yet is somehow miraculously transcended by Berger into joy and celebration. Magical.

***

Still got a few of these on tap, you lucky, lucky people. I’ll post them over the next few days. For the complete collection, click on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.