If You Abandoned Blood Meridian on an Earlier Read, Pick It Back Up and Finish It

No one has accused Blood Meridian of being an easy read.  Many people I have talked to have started the book several times, only to put it down unfinished, and that makes perfect sense to me.   The opening is carried by McCarthy’s wonderful prose, the beauty and the starkness of his language.  The world of 1849 frontier America is new and striking to us, and the cruelty and combativeness of the world’s inhabitants are fascinating.  But somewhere in the middle of the Mexican landscape the narrative drive of the novel hums so low that there is little power to carry your forward.  Scenes of carnage and horror roll by with neither comment nor clear purpose and any faith that the novel is headed anywhere you want to go is tested and, clearly for many, killed altogether.

If you find yourself suffering in this same way and wondering why everyone else seems to have such a high opinion of the book, I recommend that you plow forward, because it is really the last 70 pages that make this books so powerful and so memorable, because the greatness at the heart of Blood Meridian is the enigmatic and magnetic Judge Holden.  Aside from the judge, Blood Meridian has no real characters, by which I mean dynamic and fleshed out actors.  Instead of characters, McCarthy gives us roles: the kid, the expriest, the fool, the judge, the captain.  These roles are more suited to a morality play or a deck of tarot cards than to a novel, and the characters have all the dimension of a well-thumbed card used to tell the fortune of a person, or in this case, a country.  These characters do have names and basic relationships, but I got the distinct impression that that is only because of the historicity of McCarthy’s tale.  Characters who have been traveling with Glanton’s gang for presumably the whole of the journey will appear in one scene and then disappear just as readily. 

Oh, but the judge!  Now there is a character you can sink your fears into!  From the moment we meet him in the first chapter, he is the standout character of the novel.  His intelligence, his eloquence, his desire to manipulate and cause mayhem with no concern for the resulting carnage—he’s the man who grabs your imagination.  And it’s really not until the last third of the novel that the judge begins to be revealed to us through his philosophical lectures, so you need to keep trudging through the desert sands of the middle of McCarthy’s novel to be rewarded with the full weight of this phenomenal literary creation.

So that’s my plea to those of you who have not read the novel or who have tried and failed.  My rest of this short review will contain SPOILERS, so don’t read on unless you have finished the novel already.

The dramatic turn in the novel after the Yumas slaughtered Glanton and his gang simultaneously took me by surprise and felt exactly right.  It was unclear to me why the judge was suddenly a threat to the kid and the expriest after they had been on the same team for nearly the whole of the novel.  But at the same time, I fell right in line with their fear and cast a backwards eye on the story to see the possibility of the judge coming after them like a juggernaut.  I loved when the judge addressed the kid while the latter hid in the bones of the desert and said to him. “You alone were mutinous.  You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”  We never saw this clemency for the heathen even though we saw him display the slightest sympathy for his fellow travelers, such as when he helped brown with the arrow through his leg, or when he allowed Shelby to live while fleeing from General Elias’s men.  These are hardly grand acts of mercy and morality, but they were enough to upset the judge. 

Similarly, I loved when the judge asks the man at the end of the novel, “Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?”  I had wondered why the kid mostly disappears after he hooks up with Glanton and the judge, and this one statement makes his receding into the background both carry weight and make narrative sense.  In addition, the word “recognized” seems to carry special import in a novel where names seem to play a significant role.  As I said earlier, names are for the most part an afterthought in the novel, so I was struck when the judge called Toadvine “Louis” after the massacre of Glanton’s gang when the judge wanted to buy Toadvine’s hat.  Who knew Toadvine had any other name?  Apparently, the judge did, and this is not surprising when we think about the judge’s notebook and his determination to map out the order of the world in an attempt to master it.  As he says, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”  Nearly all the first names that appear in the novel are made known to us because the judge has revealed it, because it is the judge’s act of control to know.

Perhaps that is why the kid remains nameless to us.  The closest the judge can come to a name is “Blasarius,” which is apparently an obscure legal term for an arson, referring presumably to the fire that the kid and Toadvine set in the hotel in the first chapter of the novel.  The judge never has his name and therefore never has control over the kid.  Which takes us to the ambiguous end of the kid in the jakes of Fort Griffin.  What acts does the judge perform there to know and master the kid?  We will never know, only that it is a fate we would not wish upon anyone.

There is of course much more to say and much more to ponder, but who am I to bore you with talking.  I’d love to hear instead what you think.

The White Noise Between Life and Death

It doesn’t take a literary degree to know that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an extended meditation on death in the modern world and the way that modern suburban life works to distance us from our own mortality.  Even before the long second section that deals with the Airborne Toxic Event, Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette,  are concerned with death: who will die first, they ask each other casually.  Murray Siskind, fellow professor with Jack at College-on-the-Hill and newcomer to the town of Blacksmith, is obsessed with the town’s grocery store and its connection to death.  In our first encounter with him there, he says to Babette that the grocery store reminds him of Tibet: 

Look how well-lighted everything is.  The place is sealed off, self-contained.  It is timeless.  Another reason I think of Tibet.  Dying is an art in Tibet. . . .  Here we don’t die, we shop.  But the difference is less marked than you think.

The other professors in the American Environments Department (where they study pop culture), measure out events in their lives by death, such as recalling where they were when they learned James Dean had died.  Death is everywhere in the novel, but only as a casual thought, part of a theory about life and the world, always kept at arm’s length from any visceral fear.

Instead of dealing with fear directly, the novel  is a comedic romp through the intellectual landscape of the university and the Gladney household.  Everyone speaks in pithy profundities, and everyone has a theory about the world.  Normally those moments of sharp insight are the passages that get highlighted by the reader and pulled out for reviews and quotes to be shared with friends, but this novel is teeming with them and it quickly becomes clear that that intellectualism is something of a joke in the novel.  (As a side note, just because they are a joke doesn’t mean that they can’t also swell with the feeling of truth and seem exceedingly clever—so don’t think I wasn’t highlighting and loving all the brilliant exchanges like a fiend!)  Intellect and theory and world-weariness are all used like shields and fortresses in White Noise to protect everyone from the massive void that is death waiting at the end of the ride.

The sheer breadth of DeLillo’s discussion of modern culture in this novel amazes me.  He touches on consumerism and the effort to buy our fear away at the grocery store.  He touches on environmentalism through the asbestos matter that shuts down the girls’ school at the Airborne Toxic Event that fuels the last half of the novel.  He touch on conspiracies through the government cover-up of the Airborne Toxic Event, the shadow company that created Dylar, through the stories in the National Examiner that Babette reads to Mr. Treadwell.  He touches on issues of authority and how we rely on people in position of power to make us feel safe even when we are not, and our willingness to blindly follow government officials, doctors, professors, parents, radio personalities and more in order to not deal with the ugly possibility of chaos and death.  He touches on the American family and how it creates its own cloud of confusion and misinformation to protect itself.  He touches on academia and the silliness of intellectual thought to carve out reason in what is an unreasonable world.  DeLillo explores nearly every facet of modern life to show all the barriers and defenses that we construct to protect ourselves, and most impressively, he does it all while managing to create a compelling and at times laugh-out-loud funny tale.

Making fun of modern intellectualism always runs the risk of creating an overly-intellectual piece that becomes the thing it sets out to mock.  Because the characters are so successful in compartmentalizing their fears, it is easy for their narrative to lack any visceral punch.  For example, when the town is threatened by the black cloud of Nyocene D, there is never any fear that the novel will collapse into a tale of survival.  It is treated with humor and distance because that is how the characters react to it.  Even as panic and fear are lurking beneath their cool exteriors, we never feel them in our gut.  It is easy to be a detached reader and an unmoved observer.  Put another way, I found myself interested in the characters, but not invested in them in any way.  That is, of course, part of DeLillo’s point and plan, but it is a dangerous plan for anyone who wants gripped readers.

The way that DeLillo counters this distancing effect, I think, is with a gentleness and love toward his characters.  What I mean is that he creates a palpable sense of affection for the Gladney family and all its quirky members.  Even as he mocks the professors and Jack, there is something gentle and appreciative, not harsh and condemnatory.  DeLillo is pointing out flaws and peculiar behavior, but his criticism doesn’t mean he and his reader can’t admire the self-protecting silliness even as we recognize it in ourselves shake our head at it.  And then there is Babette, who is, I believe, the most moving character in the novel.  She doesn’t seem to be equipped with all the intellectual tools that everyone else has to fight off the darkness, so when her attempt to calm her fears with Dylar fails, she is left with a deep and black depression that is painful to read.  The deadness of her responses to Jack just make me ache for her, which is incredibly grounding.  Babette is the character whose armor is thinnest, and through her, we see the pit of emptiness that all the other characters are trying to keep at bay.

White Noise is a smart, well-written, funny, and clever novel that has earned all the acclaim it has received.  If you have not dived into its pages for yourself, perhaps it is time to do so.

Neuromancer and What It Means to Be Human

My brother has long been a fan of science fiction, so I have been aware of Neuromancer since shortly after it was printed in 1984, but until this last week, I had never read it.  Excited to finally read the novel that established cyberpunk as a genre, I was not in the least disappointed.  I was not surprised to find rainy and crowded urban streets filled with questionable characters and the neon lights of commerce.  I was not surprised to find assassins and street-wise leather-clad women.  I was not surprised to find a computer-savvy protagonist who was supposed to be one of the best in the business.  But a number of things did surprise me.

First, Neuromancer does not just create a new genre, it cobbles that genre together from several others.  Neuromancer is part science fiction, part western (complete with “cowboys” and wild west mentality), part heist narrative, part hard-boiled detective, and part classical horror (I am thinking in particular here of the Frankenstein narrative).  Gibson does a fantastic job of stitching all these elements together to create something entirely his own.  I particularly love his method of world building and the way he imagines the massive changes to human civilization down the line, from the Sprawl of urban life that stretches from Boston to Atlanta and beyond to the technological changes in warfare that introduced Mole IX, “the first true virus in the history of cybernetics.”  The slang and jargon feel organic and handily serve to further flesh out the world through which Case and his cohorts slide.

The second surprise for me was the strength of Gibson’s writing.  That really shouldn’t have surprised me, since this book is in a list of top 100 fiction novels written since 1923, but you never know.   I knew the book was famous, but I hadn’t heard anyone talk about Gibson’s language.  While he is no Marilynne Robinson, Gibson has strong, evocative imagery and some great poetic bursts.  It is clear that his first order of business is to create a fast-moving story through a three-dimensional world, so a great deal of his language is given over to completing that task, but he never loses his voice, always moving beyond the merely functional to find a consistent and, surprisingly to me, beautiful style.

The third and final surprise has to do with the arc and subject of the story, so here is where I need to break into the spoilers.  If you don’t want the novel spoiled (and really, you should plan on reading it yourself, so don’t spoil it!), then call this a positive review and return to whatever other business you have at hand.

All clear?

So first, let’s talk about the A.I. here!  From the moment Wintermute enters the story, there is the delightful tension caused by the characters trying to use their employer while the employer tries to exploit the characters.  And once the Straylight run had begun, I was trying to figure out how they would both pull off the heist and prevent Wintermute from becoming an unshackled A.I.  But no!  Wintermute got what he wanted, and all Case cared about was making sure the sacks of toxin didn’t undo his ability to jack in!  And what would this all powerful A.I. do once he was let loose upon the world?!  Turns out that it will reward those who helped it, that it will become the matrix, that it will otherwise not interfere in human life, and that it will look for similar intelligences across the universe.  Yeah, that was a shocker to me, and I find Gibson’s decision to play out the coda as he does reveals the central focus of his novel.

At its heart, Neuromancer is about what it means to be human.  The question of what makes us us is everywhere in the novel.  McCoy Pauley the person became Dixie Flatline the construct, a collection of ROM data that can imitate a person’s speech and thought but that has no existence outside of those moments it is computing.  Dixie says to Case that there is no sense of time for Dixie between moments when Case is jacked in.  All the particulars of Pauley are recreated, but there is no essence that is Pauley.  This limitation is not universal in the world of Neuromancer, however, because Linda Lee is captured at a whole different level through RAM by Neuromancer.  Case accuses Neuromancer of creating a construct of Linda, but the A.I. corrects him, “You were wrong, Case.  To live here is to live.  There is no difference.”  But even Dixie has the desire to be eradicated, a suicidal impulse not to be found in mere programs.  In addition to Linda Lee and Dixie, there are all kinds of lines between living and not-living, being oneself and not being oneself in Gibson’s novel.  There are clones (like Hideo and 3Jane), there are cryogenic stases (during which periods, the frozen person is considered legally dead), there is the distinction that Case draws between cowboys and meat (between being spread out in the matrix and bound by the flesh), there are the A.I.s, there is the dual layering of Corto and Armitage, and of course there are all the homegrown organs that can be programmed (like Case’s pancreas) and software that can be inserted directly into a human being.  All these things blur the lines between people and machines, between life and death, between objectivity and subjectivity.  So what is it that makes a human being a human being?

The traditional answer to that question is the soul, that certain something that raises us above the flesh and beyond the world.  That is why A.I.s traditionally play the role of something to be feared in science fiction.  Humans inhabit a middle ground between animals on the one hand and the spiritual power of god on the other, and when we take on the role of god, we can create a being that looks like a person but that lacks the thing only a spiritual entity can grant: a soul.  The A.I., then, again speaking traditionally, has all the faults of a human without any of the redeeming spirit necessary for compassion and understanding; therefore, A.I.s again and again are abominations that seek to enslave or destroy humankind.  But not in Gibson’s world.  The thing created, the thing that was once Wintermute and Neuromancer individually but is now some nameless entity is not very different from us.  At the end of the novel, Case asks the entity if it is now a god, and its only response is “Things are different.  Things are things.”  The entity is much smarter, much vaster, but not substantially different from us, looking for his own kind and ignoring the machinations of humans.  In short, humans are a type of machine, and the mysteries of personality and soul are unknowable to us and are more likely than not created by an individual’s body chemistry, chemistry that can be played with and reprogrammed.  We are, in Gibson’s world, nothing more than we are.  There is a grand equality to Gibson’s universe as presented in Neuromancer.  Things are things, and people are things. 

But of course things and people are also more than things, as Gibson hints at the thin line that importantly divides these matters.  The first is in Neuromancer’s observation about Linda Lee.  The reason he knows that “to live here is to live” is because Case, as he becomes aware of his vast knowledge of all knowable things in the matrix, does “not know her thoughts,” meaning Linda Lee’s thoughts.  There is some part of Linda Lee that is unknowable by data, and the extent to which that is the case is the extent to which Linda Lee is “alive.”  Similarly, Wintermute cannot know the password that allows him to merge with Neuromancer (presumably because Marie France built him that way), and Wintermute says, “You might say that I am basically defined by the fact that I don’t know because I can’t know.”  Our identities and our lives are hidden in those unknowable things, the secrets that we keep, even from ourselves.  It is no accident that Gibson calls the melodic password that is required to access the head at the center of Straylight a “true name.”  The thing must be named to be accessed, and it must be a “true” name, a name that gets at the essence that is in all other ways unknowable.  When Case first encounters Neuromancer in the form of a Brazilian boy, Case asks him his name, to which the boy responds, 

To call up a demon you must learn its name.  Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way.  You know that, Case.  Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to control.  True names . . .

In the end, people are merely biological machines in Gibson’s world, replaceable, upgradeable, predictable, breakable, and repairable.  Our intelligence is no less artificial than a computer, and the machines that we make are granted equal status as the creators.  It’s a bold and striking stance, and it’s not something I’ve ever seen posited as it is in Neuromancer.

My Exchange with Money

The intelligence and cleverness of Martin Amis’s Money snuck up on me and left me feeling as oafish as the main character, John Self.  Well, that’s not entirely fair to me, since I could see that it was being intelligent and doing some clever things, but the weight of its story didn’t fully sink in until I was sliding through the last thirty pages of the novel.  Since then, I have been making connections and notes on one of my 4x6 cards as everything started coming together in my mind.

Like so many other novels on this wonderful reading list, Money makes fantastic use of the first person narrative viewpoint.  John Self is a thirty-five year old Englishman who has raised himself from poverty to become a wealthy advertising man and maker of commercials.  He is rough and boorish, uneducated but street-smart.  At the beginning of the novel, he has quit his lucrative advertising job to work full-time on making a movie from an autobiographical storyline.  Fielding Gooding, a young, attractive producer has gathered a cast of actors, and Self runs between London and New York while the script is created and finalized, trying to make all the actors happy and keep his life in order.  Self is an alcoholic, a womanizer, a porn-enthusiast, and a man who has a very complicated relationship with money.

And of course, Money is about money.  Tapping into the zeitgeist of the 1980s (the book was published in 1984), Amis uses Self to contemplate the plight of a society with money at its heart.  On the one hand, money is everything.  If you don’t have it, you are an outcast.  Frank the Phone, the mystery caller who vaguely threatens Self throughout the novel, talks about the time Frank was destitute:

Listen.  I’ve stolen food, out of hunger, just to stay alive.  You can do it for a week.  After a month you get the look.  You look like the sort of guy who has to steal to stay alive.  And that’s it.  All over.  You can’t steal food any more.  Why?  Because they can tell, the second you walk in the store.  They can see no money in you.  Not even the memory of money.  Imagine.

And when Self visits his old friend Alec in prison, Self looks around and notes: “Everyone in here, they had all transgressed, they had all sinned against money.  And now money was making them pay.”  The sins are not sins against other people or against humanity, but against money.  And money has an unprecedented prominent place in society, Self notes, who grew up in the 1960’s: 

In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out.  You can’t drop out any more.  Money has seen to that.  There’s nowhere to go.  You cannot hide out from money.  You just cannot hide out from money any more.

Money is at the center of western society, and to say money’s nothing without your health is to miss the point that being sick without money is way worse; in fact, when you don’t have your health is exactly when you can use some more money.

So Self pursues money and secures money and worries about money, but he wants something more.  What he wants is 

to burst out of the world of money and into—into what?  Into the world of thought and fascination.  How do I get there?  Tell me, please.  I’ll never make it by myself.  I just don’t know the way.

He attempts to move from money to thought through the tutelage of his old friend and new love, Martina Twain, who appears to be a New Yorker of old money.  She surrounds herself with paintings and culture and seems to escape the crassness of money.  She is, I believe, the only character who does not seem broken and fragile and desperate in some way.  On the other hand, there is something frigid and sterile about her.  Self is introduced to a lot of culture while with her, but he most certainly doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself.  And neither does she.  Through her money, he can escape from money, but only because she has so much money.

Money is always a means to an end, but the end is never reached.  The film actors are always looking for some way to satisfy their vanities.  Self wants money to satisfy his own vanity as an intelligent man of the world whose impoverished background never gave him the chance to be cultured.  Frank the Phone is looking for vengeance, and money is his vehicle to do so.  But money never satisfies and the ends are never actually met, so there is only dissatisfaction, disappointment, and the chase for more money.  Amis is able to communicate all this not through a philosophical treatise, but through the biting satire of his novel and a funny adventure told by an oaf who is, in the end, wrong about everything he ever thought he knew.  He cannot interpret real life or real motives any more than he can understand the plots of Animal Farm and Othello.  It is a playful romp through this thoroughly modern world with great moments of power and insight.

So that’s the review.  

Here are a couple of thoughts for those who have read the novel already.  There are spoilers ahead like the bills lining John Self’s wallet.  Proceed at your own risk!

What’s the role of the royal wedding in the novel?  Princess Di’s wedding is something of a temporal landmark in the novel, and while it has nothing to do with the plot, it clearly has something to do with the themes in the novel.  These are my half-baked thoughts to which you are invited to add your own.  It seems to me that the wedding is distinctly British and that it is supposed to contrast directly with the activities taking place in New York.  Amis and Self watch the ceremony on the television and both are in tears over it.  Is this bit of theater supposed to be compared with the movie being constructed in America?  Is it in opposition to the strip clubs and porn shops in New York?  Or is it about money, about the way that money and class are both the same thing and different?  Princess Di is already a noblewoman, but moving up to Princess is certainly a social step up, and she gains not only money but national respect and awe.  This division between money and class seems much cleaner in the U.K. than in the U.S., where there is no nobility and everyone appears to be member of the nouveau riche.

The other point that I find intriguing is the presence of Martin Amis the writer in Martin Amis’s book.  At first I thought this was just cleverness and a fun dose of meta-writing, but I think there’s something much fuller going on.  After the chess game, Self takes many swings at Martin, which he describes like this: 

 I didn’t see the first swing coming—but he did.  He ducked or shied or stood swiftly aloof and my fist slammed into the light bracket above his head.  I wheeled sideways with a wide backhander, fell against the low chair and caught its shoulder-spike deep in the ribs.  I came up flailing.  I hurled myself round that room like a big ape in a small cage.  I could never connect.  Oh Christ, he just isn’t here, he just isn’t there.  My last shot upended me by the rhino-hide sofa, which kicked me full in the face with its square steel boot.  The room tipped and tunneled and fled screaming into the night. 

When I awoke, Martin was still in the room, and still talking. 

When I awoke, Martin was gone and there was no sound anywhere.

When I read this it seemed to me that Martin was a figment of Self’s imagination; “he just isn’t here.”  He bested Self at chess, even though he didn’t seem to know about Chess.  Self was playing himself, and his punches landed, insofar as he threw the punches and Self ended up bruised and injured.  By this reading, Martin is some externalization of Self’s intellect, something existing outside of money (remember that he criticizes Martin for never spending any money).  This reading also creates a funhouse of mirrors in which Martin Amis writes a first person novel as John Self, who is the “real” Martin Amis truly telling a first-person narrative.  This reading falters when in the final letter, Self notes that he and Martin aren’t friends anymore and seldom see each other, and it falters when it becomes clear that the thing Martin claims for beating Self in chess is Self’s story, his experiences, which the writer Martin Amis can turn into a bestselling novel.

And finally, is there some importance between the names Martin and Martina being so similar?  Martina’s last name is Twain, not only an author’s name, but a mere nom de plume, made up.  In the final chess scene, Martin observes that he and Martina are the “two jokers” in the pack that upset Goodney’s plans for revenge, the two things in addition to Self’s inner strength that Goodney never counted on.  And isn’t Martina a little like Peter Pan in the way that she keeps losing her “Shadow”?  She is mythical and made up in all these kinds of ways, and exceptionally literary, like Martin.  There’s an excellent essay in this idea, so if you write that essay, please let me know.  I’d very much like to read it.