The Two Sides of Maria

*Spoilers lounge in this post like drugged out starlets in a producer’s Hollywood home: read on at your own peril*

Maria, the protagonist of Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, starred in two films directed by her husband Carter Lang early in their relationship.  The first was an artistic film called Maria, never released, though it “won a prize at a festival in Eastern Europe.”  It consists of documentary-like footage of Maria going through her days.  The second film was a commercially released film called Angel Beach, about a girl, played by Maria, who is raped by a motorcycle gang.  At the end of it, the girl is a survivor, “strolling across a campus.”  Maria dislikes the first film and is uncomfortable sitting through viewings of it.  She doesn’t like being the subject of all the gazes and thoughts of the (predominantly male) audience.  But as for the second film, “she liked watching the picture: the girl on the screen seemed to have a definite knack for controlling her own destiny.”

It is not, I believe, mere chance that led Didion to make these two movies central to Maria’s acting career, for they act as the two narrative poles in Play It as It Lays.  The novel consists of dozens of short chapters that play out as individual vignettes through which we follow Maria’s emotional journey from her splitting with Carter to BZ’s suicide.  In the structure, and in third person narration, we are treated to something resembling Maria, the film.  We are forced to experience her exchanges with the people in her life from the outside, kept at a cool distance by the under-emotional narrator.  We are seldom allowed into Maria’s thoughts.  As Maria herself dislikes the first film, so I have some difficulty with this aspect of the novel.  Didion writes with beauty and power, but the long suffering of Maria threatens to cross over from interesting and moving to trying and unsympathetic.  And like Carter’s film, Didion’s novel threatens to become overly artsy at these moments.  What keeps the novel from becoming an empty and pretentious piece is Didion’s integration of a strong character and plot, elements found in Maria’s second film, Angel Beach.

Like the character she played in that film, Maria is a survivor.  In her own words, she is a player, and we see this Maria most clearly in the opening and ending of the novel.  Although the novel is primarily narrated in the third person, the novel begins with a chapter in Maria’s voice.  In that chapter, the longest in the book, we see Maria’s intellect, insight, and strength.  She is a wary and wounded soul, but there is something fierce and touching as well.  It is easy to forget this strong character as the novel wears on and we, even as we follow her closely, are kept at an arm’s length.  But as the novel nears its conclusion, we once again get a smattering of chapters written in first person, and we see Maria’s character contrasted with BZ.  Carter and Helene have been impatient with and dismissive of Maria throughout the novel, seeing her as acting out of a desire for attention and faking her symptoms.  She is considered weak and uncontrollable, a danger to Carter’s career.  Moreover, her faults seem particularly tied to her gender—her weeping and semi-hysterical behavior.  So it surprising when BZ, whom we knew would die but knew not how, is the one who swallows a handful of pills to slip into the darkness.  The signs have been there, of course, when we look back, but he had none of what came across as the histrionics that Maria displays.  In BZ’s suicide, Didion makes it clear that Maria is neither alone nor weak.  We are reminded of the determined Maria of the opening chapter, and as she lies in the bed with BZ holding his hand and comforting him on his last journey, we are also reminded of the thing that keeps Maria going in spite of her difficulties: Kate.  With BZ, Maria is comforting, understanding, and maternal.

By bringing together the two narrative styles of Maria and Angel Beach in Play It as It Lays, Didion creates a strong and moving tale.  It is both beautifully written and delicately plotted.  Generally, I’m not a fan of books and films about people who feel dead inside because they tend to be pretentious and sacrifice character to the atmosphere of ennui.  Didion’s novel works precisely because character and plot are always central to the novel, even as it explores the dark absence at the center of Maria’s existence.

What Every Girl Should Know

*Spoilers Ahead*

Having never been a pubescent or pre-pubescent girl in the 1970s and 1980s, I did not grow up reading Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I do remember it being passed around and discussed in hushed whispers somewhere in my childhood, but I never picked the book up to read it until two days ago.  Now I am a 43 year old man, and while I have a teenage child, he is a son and not a daughter, so my interest in Blume’s landmark novel is above all else literary.

Are You There God? is really a fantastic book for two reasons.  The first is the sharpness and clarity of the writing.  To some that may sound silly, since all children’s books are written with simple sentences and direct statements, but when done by a strong writer (like Blume, or Dahl, or L’Engle) the sentences have a rhythm and poetry of their own that aligns them closer to Hemingway and Vonnegut than to other children’s books.  The sentences are deceptively simple, saying much more than the individual words would suggest, packing complex meaning into the commonest language.  It reads, in short, like a stylistic choice rather than a conventional necessity.

The second reason, and the one that really blew me away, was the plot and arc of the story.  As someone who has been exposed to children’s stories for over 40 years, I kept thinking that I knew what was going to happen as Margaret journeyed through her sixth grade year in her new town.  Ah, I said to myself, she will discover that Nancy is rather a nasty person and will find a new set of friends, learning that we must choose our friends for the content of their character.  Ah, she will discover that Philip Leroy, no matter how cute he is, is a louse and that Norman Fishbein, whom she thought was a drip, actually treats her well and is a much better partner for her, learning that we can’t judge people by our first impression.  Ah, she will learn that Laura Danker isn’t stuck up at all, that she is a victim of a system that harms her as much as it does Margaret herself, that girls and women should not be judged by their appearances.  Ah, she will learn that what is most important in religion is one’s personal relationship with one’s deity and not the external trappings of religious services.  Ah, she will learn that her continued desire to be “normal” is a waste of time, that she should be able to accept who she is and let her body grow at its natural pace.

The amazing thing is that none—not one—of these things happens, at least not in any conclusive way.  When I finished the last page, I was at first disappointed, thinking that Blume failed to wrap up a few of her threads.  Then I realized that she failed to wrap up any and all of her threads!  When Margaret wrongfully attacks Laura and realizes that she has hurt Laura’s feelings, she feels rotten.  In her prayers that night she calls herself “the most horrible person who ever lived.”  And then . . . that’s the end of Laura’s role in the novel.  There is no reconciliation.  There is no scene in which Margaret and Laura become friends.  There is no scene in which Margaret defends Laura’s honor by correcting Nancy the next time she says something nasty about Laura.  That’s amazing!  Any other author would feel the need to wrap it up and have the moral spelled out for her young audience.  But not Blume.  There is an incredible trust that she puts in the intelligence and thoughtfulness of her young readers that is beautiful and inspiring.

Laura is just one of many examples of this respect that Blume feels for her reader.  Nancy is revealed to be a liar, and Margaret learns that Nancy can’t be trusted like she thought, but she doesn’t dump Nancy as a friend.  Margaret has learned her lesson and moves on to the next one.  Philip Leroy is pretty awful, and Margaret finally decides that Nancy can have him because Margaret is through with him, but that doesn’t mean she’s running to Norman, who’s nice enough to her and has a crush on her.  We don’t get that closure because life doesn’t have that kind of closure, especially not for a twelve year old.  The same thing happens in Margaret’s religious search.  Nothing gets settled.  Nothing.  Her possible reunion with her mother’s parents is thwarted by their pigheadedness, and her father’s mother is no religious hero, trying just as much to convert young Margaret.

There are dozens of life lessons in this book, but not one moral.  There is not one moment that Blume has Margaret say, “I get it!  I should just be who I am!”  And yet, I bet that nearly every girl that has read this book has understood Nancy’s faults, Philips’s shortcomings, Norman’s redeeming qualities, Laura’s mistreatment, Gretchen’s potentially damaging focus on weight, and Margaret’s double-edged desire to fit in.  What Blume captures here is life and human desires and leaves it all in the hands of her capable readers.  Blume tackles enormous topics like religion and sexuality with ease and moving beauty.  As an adult reading it, I can both ache for Margaret’s ill-placed obsession with hitting puberty even as I understand that that obsession is itself normal.

Our culture is skewed towards telling narratives about young boys who learn what it is to be a man, and not nearly enough stories about the life of young girls.  It is no wonder that young girls flocked to Blume to see common lives of other young women portrayed with humor, love, and empathy.  I love that the first image we get in the novel is of Margaret’s mother sniffing her own armpit to see if her deodorant is working.  From the get go, Blume is telling us that femininity is not going to be cloaked in any kind of glamour.  Women have bodies that aren’t sex objects, but are subjects that stink and bleed.  In the novel, we see mom brushing her teeth and leaning into a cupboard with her butt sticking out and being no different from her husband.  The one sexualized grown woman in the novel is the Playboy centerfold, and that is another moment that Blume offers without comment.  We are allowed to laugh and moan inside and respond how we will.   In an adult novel, that treatment is to be expected (or at least hoped for) but in a children’s novel, it is very rare.  If I had a daughter, I would have every one of Blume’s books on the shelf waiting for her to discover them when she was ready.  I wish now that I had had them on the shelf for my son to find as he was growing up too.

Celebrating the Three-Quarters Mark!

After nearly four years of reading, I have finally reached the three-quarters mark on this list of 100 best English-language fiction novels written between 1923 and 2006.  In November of 2013, I began book number 51 on the chronological list, James Agee’s A Death in the Family, published in 1958.  Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, number 75, is the last book on the list published in the ‘60s, which means nearly a quarter of the hundred books were published in the 1960s.  And it was a hell of a decade for fiction—I have given out more 5-star reviews in this quarter than in any of the two quarters preceding it.  There were a ton of fantastic reads, but as I have done at the previous landmark moments, I will give you my own best-of list (in chronological order):

• John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
• Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
• Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
• Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

In the interest of keeping the list short, I chose novels that I think anyone would enjoy, but there were a whole set of novels that I loved but that I think have particular tastes associated with them.  These are:

• James Agee’s A Death in the Family
• Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas
• Saul Bellow’s Herzog
• Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
• William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner
• John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Wife

There were several novels that were very well written but that didn’t resonate with me or that I found problematic politically or philosophically:

• John Updike’s Rabbit, Run
• Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
• Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint

There was only one novel that I thought the prose itself was unimpressive, even as the story was wonderful, and that was Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.  There were only a handful of sentences that I felt rose above the functional to express something beautiful or profound in a beautiful way.  The story was wonderful and the writing was fine, but the prose was not nearly as impressive as the other writer’s on this list.

And now it’s time to forge ahead into the final 25 books on the list.  I expect I’ll get there sometime in the middle of 2016.  But for now, it’s on to a book that I have never read, but that nearly every pubescent and pre-pubescent girl in the ‘70s and ‘80s read: Judy Bloom’s Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret.

I-bik, Ubik, We-All-bik

As always, there are spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.  For some books, knowing the plot takes away very little from the reading because the power of the novel is derived more from its prose and characterization.  In others, the voyage of discovery is the greatest part of the reading experience, so the plot and content should be guarded more jealously.  Philip K. Dick’s Ubik is one of these latter kinds of novels.   It is a science fiction adventure story and an exploration of the boundaries of reality in which the reader’s uncertainty and constant attempt to make a determination about what is “really” happening is crucial his or her experience.

And Ubik’s plot is indeed first rate.  I had a wonderful time trying to piece together the clues handed to me, postulating my own theories, and adjusting them as new “facts” came to light.  And as things came together at the conclusion, I was left tremendously satisfied with the journey I had been on and the open ending that left the difference between reality and the dreamworld muddled and unsure.  I especially love how everything that seems on the surface to hold itself together comes apart like Wendy Wright’s tattered clothes down the hallway of the story.  Whether or not Runciter is in half-life is obviously up for debate, but it seems to me like he has to be since it is his mind that is familiar with Des Moines in 1939; it must be from his mind that Jory is drawing the details for the world he builds.  So if Runciter and the entire group of 11 were nearly killed in the explosion, then who put them all in half-life?  In fact, as we go back through the story, it is hard to pinpoint how much of the tale is already in the half-life dream world, since Tippy Jackson and Francy have their dream about Bill and Matt, whom we know are part of Jory’s fractured mind, before they are even contracted for the Luna mission.  So is there ever any mission to the Luna settlement at all?  I love that Hollis is always discussed but never seen—is he real?  Is he some fictitious character created in the dreamworld to explain why these people are all yoked together in the half-life?  Because when you think about it, the powers of pre-cogs, telepaths, reanimators, and all the inertials are never anything more than flavoring.  Runciter talks to a telepath about Miss Wirt’s motives, but that is the only time we see the power in use, and even then it’s just a voice in Runciter’s mind.  None of the eleven “talents” use their ability, and none of their powers are relevant to the story that’s actually told except as a means to get them all together in one place for an explosion that may or may not have happened.  The official story of the explosion, we are told, is that “the bunch of us took off for Luna and got blown up in an accidental explosion; we were put into cold-pac by solicitous Stanton Mick, but no contact could be established—they didn’t get to us soon enough.”  This story makes more sense than a team full of “talents” who don’t use their talents.  When I first finished the novel and was thinking about it, I thought it was a flaw in Dick’s design that the world of psychic abilities was actually just a big red herring, that none of their powers were at all critical to the plot, that even Pat Conley’s time travel had nothing to do with events in the dreamworld.  But now I see that as part of his point, part of what we are meant to call into question.  So now we must wonder if the entire novel is a story constructed by the united half-life psyches of Jory, Joe, Glen, Ella, and the other people stuck in cold-pac.  Are they just regular people creating this idea of psychic powers to explain the misshaped world that they have found themselves in?  And in the end, there is nothing that we can point to as “real” with any kind of certainty.  That’s pretty cool.

The novel that this seems most closely related to is Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, which was published in 1966, the same year Dick began working on Ubik.  Just like in Ubik, there is no clear understanding of what is real and what is paranoid delusion in The Crying of Lot 49.  Pynchon’s novel is a meditation on paranoia and the modern condition while Dick’s is a meditation on reality and the human mind’s relationship with it.  And as Pynchon delights in the absurd, so does Dick.  The greatest examples of the absurd in Ubik are the ludicrous clothing that people wear (Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang meets the returning shuttle in “a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie”); the crazy coin-operated world that demands you travel with your pockets laden with change; and the headnotes before each chapter in which Ubik is marketed as a machine, a breakfast cereal, a deodorant, a bank, and anything that can be used to make your life better, in a Life-Magazine-Ad kind of way.  I feel like Dick is saying something larger about consumer culture and capitalism in these moments, but I can’t tease out the exact nature of the criticism or his position.  The kibbutz that Pat comes from in Topeka seems to be a communist contrast to the capitalistic coin-operated, debt-laden world of Joe Chip, and since Pat the commie is an undercover spy, there are overtones of the cold war in Ubik.  Hollis and Runciter are like the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. competing with each other and dependent on each other to define their power and purpose.  But what is the significance or meaning of that?

In the end, I don’t feel like these themes add up to something substantive.  They seem more like a lark than any kind of sustained comment or criticism.  It’s funny and fitting that Walt Disney’s head would wind up on a coin, but I don’t think Dick has any interest is going farther than that.  Whereas Pynchon feels to me like he is drawing ties to all kinds of cultural and social trends, Dick lacks the profundity, and simultaneously, for me, the sense of play that fuels Pynchon.  And that lack is what makes Dick more of an amusing surface read for me rather than something I want to keep probing as I do with Pynchon.  There is a lot to think about with Ubik, but it feels more like a collection of astute observations and funny insights than a call to probe deeply into anything, like a stand-up comic that makes us laugh and nod our heads but after which we are invited to finish our drinks and seek out more entertainment.