Graham Greene is a name I have been familiar with for a long time, but until now, I have not read any of his books. One summer, on a long drive, I listened to a BBC radio play of his book Our Man in Havana, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But The Power and The Glory is the first of his books that I have read. And according to all the little blurbs that come with my edition, it is his masterpiece.
I am not a religious man, and trials of religious people do not typically move me. There is no exception here for the unnamed priest at the center of The Power and The Glory. I can respect his struggles, and I understand his dilemma, but for the most part I was not moved by his inner religious turmoil. That said, however, I really enjoyed this book and really enjoyed the main character we follow around because even as the book is about the trials of a persecuted priest among persecuted people, it is the people and not the religion that Greene studies and discusses.
When I learned in the biographical sketch at the head of my edition that Greene converted to Catholicism when he was 26, I was very wary about what I was about to read. That knowledge acted like a lens, affecting the way I started into the book, the symbols and lessons I looked around for. That lens fell away as I got a quarter of the way into the book and simply enjoyed the story and the writing. Greene creates crisp, clear, and evocative sentences. He seemingly effortlessly creates a scene with deft description and characters come to life through their dialogue and interaction. I never found myself wanting the scenes to move faster or for the plot to develop quicker, nor did I wish to linger longer. It all moved so perfectly. And then, as I neared the end, as the whiskey priest neared the end of his journey, I suspiciously picked that lens back up and read on expecting one of two things. Either the priest was going to get his absolution and become an appropriate martyr, or he would be denied confession and die ingloriously.
Greene did something I didn't expect and he did it with great skill. The whiskey priest does indeed die without confession, without repenting of his own scenes AND he becomes a proper martyr, believably. There is nothing superhuman in the priest's fate. He does not find God's strength to face his execution. He does not transcend to some higher spiritual level in meeting his death, but it is that incredible humanity that makes his death meaningful. Unlike Christ, the priest is a man steeped in sin, but like Christ, he dies with the sins and confessions of everyone who called on him. He gave his life to hear the last confession, and he did it without seeming ridiculously pious. And his last word, overheard by the dentist, before the firing squad let loose, was "excuse." What a great and ambiguous word! Was he making an excuse for his own behavior, pleading for a stay of execution, or speaking to God as Christ upon the cross, asking him to "excuse" their murdering him, for they know not what they do? In this conclusion, Greene allows tragedy and hope to come together in a beautiful balance. He gives us the ending that the priest becomes a martyr but without it becoming a cheesy tale of morality. Greene gives it all to us, and you cannot ask for a better ending than that.
The thing Greene explores throughout the novel and the priests travels is the difference between the man and the role he performs. The priest can be a bad man, a bad priest, and still do good. He can be the horrible example he fears he is and still bring God to people. There are no wicked characters in this book; and there are certainly no saints. But what the people are like on the inside, what motivates them and occupies their mind, are different from the effect they have on other people and the world around them. The lieutenant is a kind-hearted man who gives money to a struggling man and seeks to eliminate the church for what he sees as the good of the people, but he is ready to execute innocents to reach his goal. The fang-toothed mestizo is another great example of the person and the role being at odds.
Graham Greene is another author that I plan to return too when this experiment is over. I love his writing, his plotting, and his combination of intellect and intuition to create a riveting and rewarding story.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
The Day of the Locust
As always, my review/essay contains all kinds of spoilers, so if you want to read The Day of the Locust without having anything ruined for you, go read it first and then come back. And I highly recommend reading it. It is a rather short book but one that is wonderfully written and culturally weighty, I think.
Reading Nathanael West's Day of the Locust is exactly why I love this project. It is quite possible that without this reading quest I would never have discovered this incredible writer or this thoughtful novel.
Like many of my favorite novels, Day of the Locust places its characters in a particular cultural moment and the two are thoroughly intertwined. West is able to tell a compelling story and make a larger comment on American society without ever feeling pretentious or ridiculous. West does what Tod thinks painter Alessandro Magnasco would do with his subjects: "He would not satirize them as Hogarth or Dumier might, nor would he pity them. He would paint their fury with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization." Like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and others of his time, West keeps a neutral, distant tone that respects both the characters and the readers while showing us something deep in the ways of human beings.
In a lot of ways, this novel reminded me of The Great Gatsby; only, it's The Great Gatsby turned on its head. Nick Carraway and Tod Hackett are both observers of the drama surrounding them, and both are involved without actually creating any of the drama. Nick is a transplant in the east coast, moved to New York to be a part of the financial heart of the country. Tod is a transplant on the west coast, moved to L.A., to be a part of the entertainment heart of the country. Fitzgerald uses his novel to comment on the excesses of the culture and the role that finances and wealth play in that corruption. West uses his novel to comment on the excesses of the culture and the role that entertainment and movies play in that corruption. But where Fitzgerald takes us into the lives of those who are at the center of wealth and the cultural scene, West plays around the outskirts of the entertainment industry, with the extras, the vaudevillian actors, and all those hovering on the edges.
West is quite explicit in his cultural analysis at the end of the novel when the riot breaks out in Hollywood and Tod connects that riot to the painting he has been working on through the entirety of the novel, "The Burning of Los Angeles." The masses have been lulled into working and working so that they can buy some leisure time and partake in the American Dream, but when they actually get there, they see how hollow it all is and they become restless, bored:
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that
they have been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of
their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies.
Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks,
love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet
made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't
titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough
to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated
and betrayed. They have saved and saved for nothing.
Hackett notes that "all those poor devils . . . can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence." And it's important to note that the riot is one of the middle class: "Tod could see very few people who looked tough, nor could he see any working me. The crowd was made up of the lower middle classes."
In some ways the riot at the end of the novel was jarring, because West had focused on individuals up to that point, not on masses of people. But what this technique does is cause you to reevaluate what you have read up to this point, to comb back through the novel and see the world hovering around the edges of Faye, Harry, Tod, Earle, Miguel, and Homer. And in doing so, we see that we have only been looking at a corner of West's canvas, picking out individual faces in a crowd. The ending is like a an epic pull-back of a camera in a movie, showing us the full landscape of destruction for the first time.
The whole is written upon the parts, however, I believe, and the individual characters echo the larger world of the novel. Faye, or instance, is like Hollywood and the dream that keeps everyone coming out and staying in L.A. It is obvious to everyone what she is. Tod sees right through her but wants her all the same. She is promiscuous, but he sees something innocent as well. She is not bright, but he sees that she has moments of self-awareness. Everyone flocks around her like those chasing the dream. Homer is the hard working lower middle class that saves and saves and is left only with boredom and disappointment. West consistently describes him as a poorly constructed automaton who is made up of disparate parts that don't talk to each other. His hands are alive and act by themselves, just like the crowd is made up of all these parts but act with one destructive force. And for as gentle and restrained as Homer is, one day that rock will strike him in the face and he will explode and destroy, beating adore without thought or mercy. His explosion of course mirrors the riot that sweeps Todd away.
What amazes me is that West does all this while simultaneously creating real characters and an absorbing story. This is not a political tract dressed up like a novel; this is a novel with a social conscience. And still more amazingly, West's critique feels like it could just have easily been made yesterday as over 70 years ago.
When this list is done (in five years?) I will definitely come back to read West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which is paired with The Day of the Locust in my edition. So wonderful!
Reading Nathanael West's Day of the Locust is exactly why I love this project. It is quite possible that without this reading quest I would never have discovered this incredible writer or this thoughtful novel.
Like many of my favorite novels, Day of the Locust places its characters in a particular cultural moment and the two are thoroughly intertwined. West is able to tell a compelling story and make a larger comment on American society without ever feeling pretentious or ridiculous. West does what Tod thinks painter Alessandro Magnasco would do with his subjects: "He would not satirize them as Hogarth or Dumier might, nor would he pity them. He would paint their fury with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization." Like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and others of his time, West keeps a neutral, distant tone that respects both the characters and the readers while showing us something deep in the ways of human beings.
In a lot of ways, this novel reminded me of The Great Gatsby; only, it's The Great Gatsby turned on its head. Nick Carraway and Tod Hackett are both observers of the drama surrounding them, and both are involved without actually creating any of the drama. Nick is a transplant in the east coast, moved to New York to be a part of the financial heart of the country. Tod is a transplant on the west coast, moved to L.A., to be a part of the entertainment heart of the country. Fitzgerald uses his novel to comment on the excesses of the culture and the role that finances and wealth play in that corruption. West uses his novel to comment on the excesses of the culture and the role that entertainment and movies play in that corruption. But where Fitzgerald takes us into the lives of those who are at the center of wealth and the cultural scene, West plays around the outskirts of the entertainment industry, with the extras, the vaudevillian actors, and all those hovering on the edges.
West is quite explicit in his cultural analysis at the end of the novel when the riot breaks out in Hollywood and Tod connects that riot to the painting he has been working on through the entirety of the novel, "The Burning of Los Angeles." The masses have been lulled into working and working so that they can buy some leisure time and partake in the American Dream, but when they actually get there, they see how hollow it all is and they become restless, bored:
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that
they have been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of
their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies.
Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks,
love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet
made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't
titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough
to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated
and betrayed. They have saved and saved for nothing.
Hackett notes that "all those poor devils . . . can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence." And it's important to note that the riot is one of the middle class: "Tod could see very few people who looked tough, nor could he see any working me. The crowd was made up of the lower middle classes."
In some ways the riot at the end of the novel was jarring, because West had focused on individuals up to that point, not on masses of people. But what this technique does is cause you to reevaluate what you have read up to this point, to comb back through the novel and see the world hovering around the edges of Faye, Harry, Tod, Earle, Miguel, and Homer. And in doing so, we see that we have only been looking at a corner of West's canvas, picking out individual faces in a crowd. The ending is like a an epic pull-back of a camera in a movie, showing us the full landscape of destruction for the first time.
The whole is written upon the parts, however, I believe, and the individual characters echo the larger world of the novel. Faye, or instance, is like Hollywood and the dream that keeps everyone coming out and staying in L.A. It is obvious to everyone what she is. Tod sees right through her but wants her all the same. She is promiscuous, but he sees something innocent as well. She is not bright, but he sees that she has moments of self-awareness. Everyone flocks around her like those chasing the dream. Homer is the hard working lower middle class that saves and saves and is left only with boredom and disappointment. West consistently describes him as a poorly constructed automaton who is made up of disparate parts that don't talk to each other. His hands are alive and act by themselves, just like the crowd is made up of all these parts but act with one destructive force. And for as gentle and restrained as Homer is, one day that rock will strike him in the face and he will explode and destroy, beating adore without thought or mercy. His explosion of course mirrors the riot that sweeps Todd away.
What amazes me is that West does all this while simultaneously creating real characters and an absorbing story. This is not a political tract dressed up like a novel; this is a novel with a social conscience. And still more amazingly, West's critique feels like it could just have easily been made yesterday as over 70 years ago.
When this list is done (in five years?) I will definitely come back to read West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which is paired with The Day of the Locust in my edition. So wonderful!
Thursday, June 9, 2011
The Big Sleep
You would think that after you read Tropic of Cancer nothing could shock you. But shock is always contextual. An F-bomb amongst a crowd of profanities is barely noticed, whereas the same bomb dropped in a preschool classroom gets a lot more attention. In addition, Tropic of Cancer was not a massively popular book, but The Big Sleep was. I had seen the movie, and I didn't remember anything too racy, just a lot of sharp talk and cigarette smoke. But the book has plenty of pornography, nudity, drugs, sex, and adult behavior. I wasn't expecting it. And when one character responds to Marlowe by saying, "Go ------ yourself," that dash spoke louder than any paragraph in Henry Miller's work.
But that dash, how interesting! I have seen swear words in just about every book on the list. But this book, a book written for adults, refrains. It refrains not from the sentiment, but from the word itself. And for some reason, that decision captures the moral spirit of this book. The sentiment of adult seediness is all there, but there is a big dash hovering over it. That sentiment and that dash are both in the lead character and narrator, Philip Marlowe.
In my memory, Marlowe was a worldly guy, a ladies man, a tough guy whom nothing surprises. And my memory is pretty spot on. Except that he might as well have a halo over his head. He strikes me as a noir Rhett Butler, a guy who plays the scumbag, hangs with the scumbags, but in his heart is something else. Marlowe can talk the talk and solve the puzzles, read people and anticipate their next move, but there is nothing rotten at his center. He may drink more than is approved of today, but he is unaffected by his alcohol consumption. He can drive, fight, think on his feet and resist temptation no matter how much booze is sloshing around in his belly. Here is a guy who has the opportunity to sleep with a number of women and doesn't once. He doesn't even seem to feel the temptation. Not once does he need to take a cold shower.
Instead, the thing that he cares about is an old, dying man who in turn cares about the well-being of his daughter's missing husband. The women are femme fatales every one, but their dance is made on the periphery of the action, an action that works between men. And just so that you don't go thinking Marlowe and his fellows are gay, Chandler gives us real homosexuals to contrast with Marlowe's masculinity. When the young lover swings at Marlowe, he lets you know they are different, he and the gay fighter: "It was meant to be a hard [punch], but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like." Being gay makes you weak, and Marlowe is not weak. And he is not gay either. He isn't. So stop considering it. Just stop it.
No, he isn't gay; he is a catcher in the rye, only it's not children running through the rye. It's the old man. The big moral responsibility in Marlowe's adventure is to keep the old man from discovering how rotten his corrupted daughters are and that Regan has been shot and killed by one of them.
And this tenderness that Marlowe feels for Sternwood (yeah, that sounds like an erection), and Sternwood's tenderness for Regan are set up in opposition to all the other relationships in the novel. In this world, relationships are leverage, bargaining positions that can shift as the individual's needs shift. This is a novel of alliances, not love. Los Angeles is a corrupt place where cops can be bought, pornographers protected, murderers hidden and everyone can be betrayed. And Marlowe can navigate all these shark infested waters even as he holds his moral lamp above the waters. So like Mitchell, Chandler wants it both ways--a hard and gritty novel with sentimentality tucked into the harsh folds and slid into the sharp corners.
This is a famous novel not just because it is a great storyline, not just because it is representative of a whole genre, not just because it's an excellent mystery. This novel is also beautifully written. The overstated similes that seem to be the hallmark of private detective fiction are genuine and powerful in this novel. Hell, I found them to be downright poetic. For example, "So she giggled. Very cute. The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting." That is everything a simile should be! Those giggles become a physical thing with a tangible character. Chandler does an incredible job describing his scenes with precision and color and his characters have voices you can hear, and not just because you've watched enough black-and-white movies to know the accent. The plot develops with mystery and inevitability and never gets muddled. This book is on the this list because Chandler is a superb writer.
If I had time I would love to compare The Big Sleep to Red Harvest. If there is anyone out there playing along, I would love to hear your own thoughts. Till then, I'll take my two fingers of scotch and get back to work under intermittent light of the neon sign outside my window.
But that dash, how interesting! I have seen swear words in just about every book on the list. But this book, a book written for adults, refrains. It refrains not from the sentiment, but from the word itself. And for some reason, that decision captures the moral spirit of this book. The sentiment of adult seediness is all there, but there is a big dash hovering over it. That sentiment and that dash are both in the lead character and narrator, Philip Marlowe.
In my memory, Marlowe was a worldly guy, a ladies man, a tough guy whom nothing surprises. And my memory is pretty spot on. Except that he might as well have a halo over his head. He strikes me as a noir Rhett Butler, a guy who plays the scumbag, hangs with the scumbags, but in his heart is something else. Marlowe can talk the talk and solve the puzzles, read people and anticipate their next move, but there is nothing rotten at his center. He may drink more than is approved of today, but he is unaffected by his alcohol consumption. He can drive, fight, think on his feet and resist temptation no matter how much booze is sloshing around in his belly. Here is a guy who has the opportunity to sleep with a number of women and doesn't once. He doesn't even seem to feel the temptation. Not once does he need to take a cold shower.
Instead, the thing that he cares about is an old, dying man who in turn cares about the well-being of his daughter's missing husband. The women are femme fatales every one, but their dance is made on the periphery of the action, an action that works between men. And just so that you don't go thinking Marlowe and his fellows are gay, Chandler gives us real homosexuals to contrast with Marlowe's masculinity. When the young lover swings at Marlowe, he lets you know they are different, he and the gay fighter: "It was meant to be a hard [punch], but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like." Being gay makes you weak, and Marlowe is not weak. And he is not gay either. He isn't. So stop considering it. Just stop it.
No, he isn't gay; he is a catcher in the rye, only it's not children running through the rye. It's the old man. The big moral responsibility in Marlowe's adventure is to keep the old man from discovering how rotten his corrupted daughters are and that Regan has been shot and killed by one of them.
And this tenderness that Marlowe feels for Sternwood (yeah, that sounds like an erection), and Sternwood's tenderness for Regan are set up in opposition to all the other relationships in the novel. In this world, relationships are leverage, bargaining positions that can shift as the individual's needs shift. This is a novel of alliances, not love. Los Angeles is a corrupt place where cops can be bought, pornographers protected, murderers hidden and everyone can be betrayed. And Marlowe can navigate all these shark infested waters even as he holds his moral lamp above the waters. So like Mitchell, Chandler wants it both ways--a hard and gritty novel with sentimentality tucked into the harsh folds and slid into the sharp corners.
This is a famous novel not just because it is a great storyline, not just because it is representative of a whole genre, not just because it's an excellent mystery. This novel is also beautifully written. The overstated similes that seem to be the hallmark of private detective fiction are genuine and powerful in this novel. Hell, I found them to be downright poetic. For example, "So she giggled. Very cute. The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting." That is everything a simile should be! Those giggles become a physical thing with a tangible character. Chandler does an incredible job describing his scenes with precision and color and his characters have voices you can hear, and not just because you've watched enough black-and-white movies to know the accent. The plot develops with mystery and inevitability and never gets muddled. This book is on the this list because Chandler is a superb writer.
If I had time I would love to compare The Big Sleep to Red Harvest. If there is anyone out there playing along, I would love to hear your own thoughts. Till then, I'll take my two fingers of scotch and get back to work under intermittent light of the neon sign outside my window.
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