Amis' Inferno Ends -- Hustvedt's "What I Loved"

Martin Amis' "The Moronic Inferno" kept the straight shooter model throughout. He examines a Ronald Reagan campaign for president, as well as Stephen Spielberg, Joseph Heller, Joan Didion, Gloria Steinem, Hugh Hefner, plus an attack on political correctness and other American cultural elements that are ridiculously dated (remember I said this book is a collection of essays written in the early 1980s. All in all, the book was a nice read, but I don't recommend it unless you are trying to take a trip down amnesia lane.

"What I Loved" by Siri Hustvedt has been a literary tour de force. I believe this is the fastest I have read a book in my life, I think. I started yesterday morning and I am in page 256 of 364. The story takes place in New York City and it follows the life of four artists/academics as they struggle to make sense of their increasingly complicated world. Leo is the narrator and he is a professor of art history; his wife Erica is a literature professor at Rutgers. Leo's friend Bill starts out as a struggling artist, but becomes a highly respected modernist. Bill is married to Lucille but the marriage sours and he ends up divorcing and marrying Violet Blom instead. Violet had been Bill's model at one time. At any rate, both couples grow together, supporting each other through and through. Leo and Erica's son, Matthew, dies while away at camp, and they are all left to try and fulfill their parenthood at the expense of Bill and Lucille's son, Mark. There are around two or three different narratives going on at the same time and the book becomes undone while the lengthy descriptions of Bill's art pieces take place. Also, at the beginning, some of the expository seems forced. For example, "When we met, Erica was assistant professor in English at Rutgers, and I had already been teaching at Columbia in the art history department for twelve years. My degree came from Harvard, hers from Columbia..." All this seems a lot of information and breaks some of the narrative style she had established with Leo's voice. That, I believe, is the only drawback (it happens several times throughout) with the novel. It is, nevertheless, one of the most engrossing novels I have read in a long time; I can sit and read for hours and totally get lost in the narrative without a worry in the world. It's lyrical and full of passion.

I forgot to mention that Siri Hustvedt is married to Paul Auster. I picked up her book because I had read a terrible review of "A Plea for Eros," also by Siri Hustvedt, and wanted to know what the offense was. So far, no complains... but Paul Auster is still my favorite.

Martin Amis' "The Moronic Inferno" ii

Something is beginning to strike me as odd as I read Martin Amis' essays from "The Moronic Inferno." I think that there's a liberal twists to the essays but it is so slightly done that it is almost untraceable. Almost untraceable that is, until you hit a tough spot like, say, Norman Mailer. Yes, it is true that Norman Mailer's persona literaria has been designed and engineered after Hemingway's mold (that should be obvious to anyone), and this makes it hard for Amis to take a swipe at the hairy chested Mailer without being too obvious. I don't have any problem with people taking a swipe at Hemingway or Mailer, but I do have to "problematize" the reasons behind it. I believe that a lot of what passes for lit crit today is just an excuse to bash one group for the emotional benefit of another. "Let's bash group X so that group Y can feel better and have better self esteem, or worst yet, group Y can feel that the wrong done to them can be corrected by the denouncement of another group (whether that other group is responsible or not)." The problem with this is that it isn't a humanist approach to the enjoyment, the study or even the qualification of literature as good, bad, worthwhile or enjoyable. The entire process becomes a vehicle for 1) identifying a group seeking victimization, and 2) holding another group responsible for the oppression that caused the victimization. Norman Mailer gets it from feminists, post-modern critics, politicos, ethnic and racial minority groups, etc., just as Hemingway does too. Never mind that the literature of both men, (perhaps not so much Mailer) might not have been conceived in order to degrade women, single out "negroes," or bashing other minorities. Never mind... this is way too complicated. I think Amis is amiss on this one as much as other "lit crit" people are in the "post-modern" world. I don't have anything about people writing from the left or the right, just as long as they don't claim that they are not doing so when it is obvious they really are.

Martin Amis is much "cuter" and "nice" when covering an interview with author-turned-politico, Gore Vidal. He treats Vidal with reverence and with a white glove tendency. Of course the story of Mailer's attack (physical attack) of Gore Vidal comes up and we get Vidal's version quite clearly... biased and unfair as it is. I think in general Gore Vidal is to American Letters what Oprah has become to American television... no one can say anything bad about either one. But like I said in the previous post, Amis is dated, the essays are dated and so is the book. I am enjoying reading it more for its "yeah-I-remember-when-Reagan-was-president" quality than for literary entertainment.

The eight pages I wrote last week are still sitting there, waiting. Working title: "My Personal View of the Battle of Khafji." I am stuck and thinking it is better left unwritten.

Samrat Upadhyay's "The Guru of Love"

I haven't written an entry in a while. I really don't have an excuse other than the fact that I have been working on my website for work and continue to do so while reading at the same pace and not posting an entry here. Neither have I read or respond to any other blog. I did write, however, a response to the Islamic Fundamentalist new cry over Salman Rushdie being knighted, but I rather not post it because it is fair to say I would be sharing a fatwa with Rushdie and I am in no position to go into hiding. I plan to post it anonymously as a response on a political website soon. It's sad, really, not the way I had planned my summer holiday.

I finished reading "K: A Biography of Kafka" and immediately started "The Guru of Love." I read at a pace that was comfortable, keeping in mind that every time I get into such an engrossing story I tend to finish in a day an a half or so. The author, Samrat Upadhyay, is a friend of mine. He taught at Baldwin-Wallace College for a while. It was there that he gave me a copy of "Arresting God in Kathmandu" complete with a delightful dedication. He is a very nice man. At any rate, "The Guru of Love" is a sad story (depending on which character you decide to identify with) about a math teacher who falls in love with one of his tutorees. Ramchandra, the math tutor, and his student, Malati, begin an affair despite the fact that Ramchandra is a highly devoted husband and father of two. It is interesting how Upadhyay introduces the relationship--it is done so simply and lightly that one has to re-read the passage (i.e.: "did that just happened?"). Ramchandra can't hide the truth from his wife and when he tells her, his wife decides that the best thing to do is to bring Malati to live with them under the same roof. Along the way, many things happen that add so much to the plot it is nearly impossible to believe Upadhyay could write such a beautiful novel in just 290 pages. Furthermore, the economy and lyricism of language is enough to declare this the Nepalese "Gatsby." This is a novel to read and re-read; it is deeply affecting, moving, engrossing, and lyrical. (Samrat didn't pay me to say this, really).

I am presently reading Martin Amis' "The Moronic Inferno." This is a collection of "dated" essays about contemporary (1980s) America. There are some interesting takes on Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth and Truman Capote. So far, the essays read like lit crit, but I suspect that the later essays will be more about society and its problems, etc. Too early to tell but so far a significant read.

William Gass, Martin Amis' "Dead Babies" & Murakami's "After Dark"

I haven't posted for a while due to work obligations. I have continued reading voraciously, though. So Gass continued to the very end being the tough writer that he is. He does not relent when it comes to arguing and exposing philosophical truths galore. In the second half of the book, he offers even more academic high discourse. While I may be critical of others doing the same, Gass wins the reader over by simply approaching his topic lineally; that is to say, he offers a great amount of background information before he takes off on a tangent. His writing, as I have said before, it's not for the faint of heart. There are quite a few interesting examples of what Gass considers the "simple" in literature. He reviews the great "simplists"--Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. There's a great difference, states Gass, between the "simplist" and the incomprehensible. Stein plays right along the border of this distinction with "Melanctha," a story in which she successfully employs the vernacular but totally loses the central coherence of the story. Hemingway fairs the same criticism. The last few essays of "Finding a Form" were difficult to read, but I pressed on and enjoyed even the tough ones.

I had promised that I was going to tackle "After Dark" by Haruki Murakami next, but I took a detour and read Martin Amis' "Dead Babies" instead. The story takes place in the span of one weekend at a English country estate called the Appleseed Rectory. There are a series of characters divided into three groups: the Appleseeders, the Americans, and "others." The main characters include an intellectual named Quentin and his wife Celia; Andy Adorno, a reckless vagabond who is sort of a gypsy; Giles, a hopeless drunk who dreams of losing all of his teeth; Keith, a midget who is frustrated with life overall; Diana, partner to Andy Adorno. The Americans (Marvell, Skip, and Roxanne) are a threesome (in all the sense of the word) who come as an invitation by Quentin. Marvell is an illegal drug impresario and specialist. The jest is that Marvell--during the course of the weekend--is to give drugs to all the other characters as an experiment/performance thus pushing everything to its limits.

The structure of the novel is "reader friendly." Some of the chapters begin with a flashback and biographical notations on the main characters. This is useful because the reader has a point of reference for many of the strange decisions the characters make during the course of the novel. Martin Amis attempts at a style caught between the dream-like and the explicit with great success. Where the novel goes amiss (no pun intended) is Martin Amis' experimentation with stream of consciousness; he interjects these in the most strange places and they don't seem to follow anything dealing with the plot. Overall, the experiment doesn't offer anything to the plot. There are very funny passages dying to be interpreted from a Freudian point of view. Giles' constant dream of losing all of his teeth (which is the scene that begins the novel) is one of the many passages. There's a lot of expectation driven by the characters ambitions (sexual and otherwise) during the course of the weekend. The end is a massive discombobulation which ends the novel quite well.

I am in the first few pages of "After Dark" and I can already tell it is Murakami at his best. Murakami really excels writing about urban settings. He really gives it life and at the same time the mystery of every corner of the city comes across clearly and distinct.