#94: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

    'And you,' I said.  'Do you believe in God?'

    'It doesn't matter,' she answered calmly, 'what I believe or you believe, because we can do nothing about it, we are like these.'  She flicked a dead moth off the table.

Wide Sargasso Sea nails 'place.'  The thick, humid, gothic colonized islands.  Unfortunately, the storytelling is somehow both overly simplistic and difficult-to-follow, and the characters feel rather blank.

I've never read Jane Eyre, which this book is a sort-of prequel to, at least plunging into the past of the mad wife, Bertha, from Eyre.  I read repeatedly, however, that the book stands perfectly well on its own.  Well, I'd say that's pretty true, I feel like I got the story, but I felt no attachment to the characters.  This was the major shortcoming of this book.

The cast of characters is as slim as the novel.  Antoinette (re-christened Marionette, later Bertha...), her husband, and a few house servants, and the story is a chronicle of how Antoinette loses her mind.  We follow the white, Creole Antoinette from birth to womanhood as she encounters racism, a loveless marriage, and insanity.  The story is simple, as it should be.  The story is sad, as it should be ('It was like the morning when I found the dead horse.  Say nothing and it may not be true.').  But all these aspects were irrelevant, because I didn't care if the main character went crazy or not.  The characters are so neutrally drawn, and many of the actions they take feel unmotivated, like a way to make the story sadder.  But maybe one does need the foreknowledge of some of these characters to give them depth.

Taking place mostly on Jamaica and Dominica, Rhys (who was Dominica-born) has native people of the islands cast as the servants, and through them drops in themes of racial inequality, displacement, and black magic.  Rhys also pours a lot of bitterness and anger into her writing.  This leads to some beautiful, elemental passages conjuring fire, magic ("obeah"), and the dead.  In these moments, the book has a potent (if turgid) power.

RECOMMENDATION?  This book was a slog.  It was the shortest yet, but it also took the longest for me to read.  Every page is depressing, which can be cathartic, but only if we have established a deep attachment to the target character.  Rhys fails to achieve this, so we're left with bitter molasses with bits of truly worthy, primal writing.  Wasn't worth the grind for me.

-N.C.

#60: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

"It's not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh."

Hoo boy, we've got an overwritten, plotless bore on our hands here.  The big shame here is that Percy is a hell of a writer.  But every sentence is a too painstaking.  I wanted him to be a bit more careless as a writer.  I think he has it in him; his narrator (the book is written in first-person, present tense), Binx Bolling, displays flashes of very funny, very dry wit throughout.

We follow Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker, womanizer, and moviegoer, during the week leading up to his 30th birthday (and Mardi Gras).  He lives his life according to "the search," a constant hunt for anything to avoid what he constantly calls "malaise."  A lot of his search involves dalliances with his revolving-door secretaries, but while he's a fancy writer, Percy is also a sexless one, so most of his "search" regarding his own relationship with sex falls flat, despite its potential.  God also comes into the picture about two-thirds into the book; I'm all for a late-game Hail Mary, but the introduction is sudden and jarring.  Apparently six years after The Moviegoer was published, Percy converted to Catholicism, and Bolling's agnostic tone is unconvincing.

But the book's main flaw is that nothing happens.  It's a bit of a chore to read, especially the first 100 pages.  So much of the book occurs in Bolling's mind, and while some of my favorite books do the same (The Stranger and Heart of Darkness come to mind), Percy is unable to plunge as deeply as Camus and Conrad, so the reader is left wanting.

RECOMMENDATION?  Skip it.  Percy is obviously a writer of talent, but it suffocates his book.  There is a 20 page stretch where Bolling and his cousin are on a train to Chicago, and the book gets really good.  But that doesn't happen until page 184...

-N.C.

Off-List: South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

During the summer, shortly before embarking on the list with D.B., I had my first exposure to Murakami with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. D.B. had been emphatically recommending I read that book for years.  After months of false starts, I finally broke through last summer and made it through the entire beast.  I was pretty much blown away.  While the novel definitely has difficult bits to get through, I find that a lot of my favorite books, plays, movies, albums, etc. require a certain amount of endurance and constitution.  As long as there is artistry (as opposed to pure tedium, often the case), I find difficult works cathartic and majestic.  Like the secrets they contain come at a cost.  I also am a sucker for writers who do "dreamy" well.  Extremely rare.  Paul Auster and Murakami do it very well.  As a reader, I sink into their writing.  I think one of the secrets of effective dreamy writing is not random weirdness, but rather following an hidden yet established logic of the dreamworld.

Anyway, my point is this: after Wind-Up Bird, I wanted more.  D.B. recommended South of the Border, West of the Sun.  While Wind-Up followed one protagonist, the novel is a stack of many storylines.  South of the Border is stripped, stripped down.  The story is simple: Hajime loses touch with Shimamoto, the love of his life, at 12 years old, grows up, marries, has two kids, opens up a pair of very successful jazz bars.  One random, drizzly night, over 20 years after losing touch, Shimamoto walks into the bar looking for Hajime.  The story is a melancholic etude on "What If?"

The book feels like light, misty rain.  I know the story takes place in Tokyo, but I can't help but imagine L.A.  A neon-lit, low-to-the-ground, cheerfully sad place.  I also appreciate Murakami taking a more considered and thoughtful take on infidelity.  His stance is certainly not pro-affair, but he asks questions regarding hanky-panky.  Does the reward ever outweigh the cost?  How does a marriage work through infidelity?  What reasons beyond love make a marriage worth saving?

RECOMMENDATION?  Minor Murakami.  If you're new to the author, I would recommend starting elsewhere unless you insist on testing the waters first with this lovely, quietly sad, simple novel (almost a novella).  But I'd recommend taking the plunge and starting with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The Moviegoer is next.  Post forthcoming...
-N.C.

#2: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Like many upstanding young Americans, I read this one during my junior year in high school.  I remember enjoying how this, along with Heart of Darkness, felt like my first foray into "sophisticated" literature.  Re-reading the book now, 13 or so years later, I'm tickled by how the story isn't particularly sophisticated, but boy-howdy, Fitzgerald's writing is.

As a pageant of imagery and lyricism, the book is a blowout.  It is the Feast of St. Stephen.  His images are effortless, structurally complex sentences are presented as unfurling spools of silk cloth.  Beyond evocative line after evocative line, what amazes me most is how approachable and crystal clear the writing is.  As I mentioned in my last post, from a writing standpoint, this novel was a fascinating pairing with Brave New World.  Think Davis Foster Wallace paired with Cormac McCarthy.

Another memory from when I first read the book in high school, I had never felt so close to a book's narrator before.  This is something else the book does beautifully: Fitzgerald establishes such a close bond between reader and narrator.

Now, this puppy is #2 on the list (just behind the much-fabled Ulysses).  Should it be?  I look forward to reading more of the top 10 novels to make a stronger assessment.  The story is fairly simple, especially when compared with the epic scope of Brave New World.  But complex equals not quality.  Still, I get the sense that it's Fitzgerald's gifts as an author that are ranked at #2, rather than the book itself.

Nevertheless, within its simple structure, I enjoy the little character contradictions and speed bumps Fitzgerald employs.  It's hard to see any of these characters as "good people."  Fitzgerald really fleshes out each character.  I particularly enjoyed how Daisy was not a demure, all-American "good girl," but rather a spoiled, unfaithful Northeastern gal.

RECOMMENDATION?  Oh, yeah, you should read this one.  Time will tell if the novel is ranked a little too high on the list (I suspect it is...), but the quality of the writing is plainly undeniable.  A simple, but very rich, story about chasing after one's dreams.

The next pair has been drawn!  It's The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (#60) and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (#94).  But first, a little off-list Murakami...
-N.C.

#5: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

So D.B. and I cheated a bit, and allowed ourselves to handpick our first pair of novels.  I went for Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World.  Good gravy what an incredible book.

The story is set in London 2540 (or the Year of our Ford 632), where society has set up an ultra-strict caste system based on genetic developments.  The higher castes are required to engage in organized sex rituals and consume a government issued hallucinogen, soma.  The story follows (at first) Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne, first in their day to day life and eventually on holiday at the Savage Reservation in New Mexico.

The book feels startlingly current, in both content and writing style.  The book imagines a future society where recreational sex and drug use are government sanctioned cornerstones.  All this is even more shocking when remembering that this book was written 80 years ago.  

Structurally, the book is watertight.  I love how Huxley switches focus midway from Lenina and Bernard to John.  The big shift in protagonist occurs at the same time Lenina and Bernard bring the Savage back to London, and beautifully disrupts not only the New World State's society, but also the reader.

As a writer, Huxley is a very interesting compliment to Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby is the other book of our pair).  Fitzgerald is so clearly a master of imagery rife with poetic flairs.  Huxley is terse.  Not as spare as, say, Hemingway, but he reveals the chilling details of the world in flashes and glimpses.  I still get chills recalling two brief lines from a nursery rhyme: THE CAT IS ON THE MAT.  THE TOT IS IN THE POT.  And I won't give it away, but I will never forget the austere final lines of the book.

RECOMMENDATION?  Read this book!  Yes.  Read it.  It is rightfully near the top of the list and feels incredibly contemporary.  SO MUCH modern science fiction (particularly sci-fi depicting dystopian societies) steals heavily from this (and 1984), so if you haven't yet, pay your dues by reading the original.

Up next is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby...

-N.C.