I Loved Beloved

*Spoilers ahead*

When I first read Beloved in 1992, a few years after it came out, it showed me what contemporary fiction could be like at its most beautiful and most meaningful.  I had never read anything so poetic and so gritty at the same time.  Coming back to it now, nearly 25 years later, I find that the book is even more amazing than I remember.  Toni Morrison’s novel is one of the best I have ever read.  There is everything to love about this book; characters, plot, language, scope, dialogue, emotions, meaning—these are all pitch perfect and come together in a way to create a masterpiece of fiction.

Beloved is set in the outskirts of Cincinnati in the 1870s. Sethe is an ex-slave living in a house once occupied by her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, who was bought out of slavery by her son, Sethe’s husband, Halle.  While Sethe had four children, only her youngest, Denver, now 18 years old, lives with her.  Denver’s older brothers ran away from home before they were thirteen, and they haven’t been heard from since.  The third child, a girl whose name we never know, was killed by Sethe’s hand shortly after Denver’s birth when Sethe’s slave master tracked her down and came to reclaim his property.  Sethe attempted to kill her children instead of letting them return to slavery.  She only succeeded in killing the one child, though she and the remaining three children were soaked in the toddler’s blood.  This is the setting for the drama that unfolds when Sethe and Denver receive two new visitors: Paul D, a field slave from Sweet Home, where Sethe was a slave, and a woman calling herself Beloved, and who appears to be the return of the murdered child.

The novel is simultaneously intimate in its setting and epic in its scope.  Most of the novel takes place in 124, the house Sethe occupies.  We occasionally see Sweet Home, and rarely see the streets of Cincinnati and a smattering of other locales.  The thrust of the drama centers on this single family, but through these specifics, Morrison is speaking to the condition all black Americans in the wake of the slavery, both during Reconstruction and, I believe, well into the present.  Everyone we meet in Beloved is deeply scarred by the lives they lived under slavery and continue to live in a world in which white people are an ever-present threat to the autonomy and peaceful existence of black people.  What we see in Beloved, in short, is the way that slavery and the American system of white supremacy has crippled and will continue to cripple black lives.

The continuing criticism of Sethe, for example, is that her “love is too thick” or that she loves too deeply.  To protect themselves from the terror of slavery, the black characters have had to learn to love small, to keep themselves at an emotional distance from anything they love, including their children.  Paul D claims that he no longer has a heart, just a “tobacco tin lodged in his chest” that has been rusted shut to protect him from feeling anything too greatly.  In his love for Sethe and his learning of her actions, that tin is busted open and all of its contents pour out, driving him to solitude and drink until he can put it together.  Baby Suggs has to struggle to learn to live with her new degree of freedom.  When she is thinking about her old masters, she realizes that “ she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like,” or as Sethe observes, “freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another.”  Baby Suggs knows that “the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home.”  What finally broke Baby Suggs was the realization that no matter how “free” she was, the white men could still invade her yard at any time and cause the destruction of the things she loved.  The appearance of the four horsemen that led Sethe to her desperate actions in the cold house drove Baby Suggs to her bed to contemplate things that couldn’t hurt anybody, namely the colors blue, yellow, and pink.

Beloved is like a war story in which the characters are trying to adjust to a society after the brutality of war, only what these characters suffered is much greater and much more horrifying than anything witnessed on a battlefield.  Generations are ruined and maimed.  Even Denver who is born in freedom is not spared the ravages of slavery.   And even as Denver ends the novel putting her life together, there is no suggestion that everything will be ironed out in a few generations because as long as there is not equality, the white men will always be able to come into your yard.  Love can never be allowed to be “thick” in those conditions, and a cautious love is always a watered-down love.

Among all the other things that Beloved is, it is also a coming of age story.  In the final section, Denver “inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.”  She becomes a part of the community and learns to soldier on like all the men and women before her.  Merely stepping beyond the limits of the yard:

 Remembering those conversations and her grandmother’s last and final words, Denver stood on the porch in the sun and couldn’t leave it.  Her throat itched; her heart kicked—and then Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. ‘You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina?  About your daddy?  You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back?  I never told you all this?  Is that why you can’t walk down the steps?  My Jesus my.’

             But you said there was no defense.

             ‘There ain’t.’

             Then what do I do?

             ‘Know it, and go on out of the yard.  Go on.’

There is triumph of courage and determination.  There is bravery and camaraderie.  There is love and support, and there is the promise of better things down the road, such as the suggestion that Denver might be going to college.  In the face of all the hardships, damages, and unbeatable racism that surrounds them, these characters keep forging ahead with admirable courage.

I want to go on and on.  There needs to be discussions about the white people in the novel (such as the Bodwins, who “hated slavery worse than they hated slaves”).  We need to talk about the act of naming.  We need to talk about why the house is referred to as 124.  We need to talk about the absence of young black men in the novel.  We need to talk about the symbolic importance of milk.  We need to talk about ghosts and the brand of magical realism that Morrison employs.  We need to talk about pride and its complicated place at the juncture of individuals and communities.   We need to talk about the uncommon poetry and insight and weight that Morrison creates from the most common of words.  I want to go on and on, but if you get it already you don’t need my elaboration, and if you don’t, you stopped reading ages ago. 

Beloved is one of the most beautiful, painful, insightful, meaningful, and important books I have had the pleasure to read.  Were we as a nation ever to have the conversations about race that we keep insisting on not having, this book would be a wonderful starting point.

Watchmen

Watchmen hit the stands when I was 14 years old and still reading Iron Man and Daredevil, sticking to classic superhero stories rather than special issues like Watchmen.  I remember my brother being very into the series when it first came out, though by the time the last issue hit the market, he was away at school, so I don’t know his final feelings about the series.  I didn’t pick up Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibson’s creation for the first time until shortly before starting this reading list, when my sister lent me her copy, sometime in 2008 or 2009.  I read it quickly and had mixed feelings about the whole thing.  I found it by turns brilliant and pretentious, insightful and tired.  I remember being especially dissatisfied with the climax of the mystery, the look of the whole puzzle once it had been put together.

The novel, as you would expect with such a dense piece of literature, benefits from a second read.  While there were a few chapters that I still thought were lacking (Chapter VI, for example, in which Rorschach’s past is revealed), I found the narrative on the whole consistently compelling, and I got entirely over the feeling that the storytellers were being pretentious.

The things that struck me are the things that would strike any attentive reader.  Gibbons rewards the reader with so many little details within the frame--from newspaper headlines, to graffiti, to background action--that it becomes a pleasure to linger on each frame and see what treasures are hidden within.  In this same vein, the geography of the main street corner featured in the story, where the Gunga Diner, the newsstand, The Utopia theater, and the Promethean cab company are located, is beautifully consistent in ways that slipped by me on the first read.  Every garbage can and architectural line are attended to, and it becomes clear to the reader only over time that scenes are taking place in the same vicinity.  The third gift Gibbons and Moore give to their readers is the clever transition, in which the positioning of characters in one frame matches the positioning of entirely different characters in another frame.  These visual connections of two different situations and groups of actors seem to me thematically linked to the story told in addition to being simply neat. 

Watchmen cares about the interconnectedness of all things, just as we are all bound up together on this Earth, sharing one fate.  The recurring visual act of zooming out from an extreme closeup to a wide shot asks the reader to see where each part exists in the larger composition.  And the main recurring structural tool employed by Moore and Gibbons is the interweaving of narrative elements, either by physically intercutting two scenes or overlapping one scene’s visual elements with the audio elements of another scene.  The best example of this of course is the way the Black Freighter comic in integrated into the scenes of the lives unfolding around us.  These acts might come across as tricks or merely cute when first encountered, but it becomes clear that the technique is thematically tied to the point of the novel.

Moore and Gibbons create such a complete and compelling alternate universe that whether you find the conclusion satisfactory or not, you cannot help but admire all the thought and artistry that went into this unique novel.

Being a Man Gets Harder All the Time - Richard Ford's Sportwriter

*Spoiler lie ahead like statistics in a baseball program.  Read on at your own risk.*

The Sportswriter is the story of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old, white, newly-divorced, father of two, living in Haddam, New Jersey.  Frank is not only our subject but also our narrator.  In his opening address to the reader, he tells us “that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret.  Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.”  He continues, “I believe I have done these two things.  Faced down regret.  Avoided ruin.  And I am still here to tell about it.”  What follows is the story of his regrets, how he faced them down, and how he avoided ruin. 

While the “present” of the novel covers the three-day weekend of Easter, Frank looks back at the scope of his life and gives us scenes from a good deal of his past, and he has a lot of things, like we all do, to potentially regret.  His marriage dissolved after his wife discovered a pack of letters from a woman who admired Frank, but with whom he did not have an affair.  His oldest son, Ralph, died of a horrible disease a few years back, before his marriage came to an end.  He had a promising future as a fiction writer, what he calls a “real” writer, but his drive to tell those stories died out and he switched to sportswriting, which he greatly enjoys.  He tried teaching college students for a spell and had a lengthy affair with a woman there while he was married but about which his wife knows nothing still.  He has no deep and lasting friends that he can lean on or that can lean on him.  Through the course of the novel, his relationship with his latest girlfriend, Vicki, comes to an end.  Through it all, Frank has a relatively easy-going attitude that acknowledges mistakes but does not give in to the emotional weight of regret.

In recounting the details of his life, Frank creates systems by which he can understand his reaction to events.  He discusses “dreaminess,” the difference between being a “literalist” and a “factualist,” the importance of embracing “mystery,” the danger of “empty moments” and the emotional state of “looking around” your feelings.  These are the intellectual signposts that he has erected to understand and direct his life.

On the one hand, it’s a really excellent idea for a novel.  On the other hand, I found myself with very little patience for Frank and his narration.  The book from my reading list that The Sportswriter most reminds me of is Updike’s Rabbit, Run.  Both novels have an ass of a main character whom it appears that we are supposed to have some fondness or admiration for that just doesn’t make sense to my brain.  (For my review of Rabbit run, click here --->http://insearchofsmarts.blogspot.com/2013/12/on-run.html.)  And like Rabbit Angstrom, Frank Bascombe is given multiple novels beyond his debut, which once again suggests that a number of readers really enjoyed hanging out with Frank.  Everyone responds to literature from his or her own perspective on life, and different viewpoints resonate with different people who see the world in different ways.  This is not a character or a perspective that spoke to me.

Frank is one of the most self-involved characters I have read, and not in a charmingly selfish kind of way.  He has enough sympathy to understand other people, but he really doesn’t give two shits about them.  Until he interviewed Herb Wallagher for the magazine, I merely found Frank’s posture annoying, that of a down-to-earth guy without pretensions who is keen at spotting the pretensions of other people.  Herb, the wheelchair-bound athlete in Michigan, was the first character in the book that I found fascinating, and he freaked Frank out.  Finding something more complicated than he was prepared for to write a piece that could “pull a heartstring,” Frank dismisses Herb as “crazy” and flees like that craziness might be contagious.  Then there is the continual condescension Frank expresses toward the people of the Midwest.  Frank puts a lot of stock in regional stereotypes (in spite of his insistence that he couldn’t be a writer because too much literature reduced the complicated realities of life into ready-made stereotypes), and will gladly go on about Midwesterners, Michiganders, New Englanders, Texans, and on and on.  In fact, he embraces stereotypes of all kind.  He anticipates Vicki’s father will be “a gun store owner type.”  When he finds a picture in Vicki’s bag of what he assumes is her ex-husband, he notes, “I would recognize him anywhere.  Lonesome Pines was full of such types.”  The police in town are “guinea[s]” and “spaghetti-bender[s].”   In his thoughts about Bosobolo, his African boarder, Frank lets us know that Bosobolo is “almost certain the kind to have a long aboriginal penis.”  What?!  There is a “kind” for that?

Bosobolo brings us to how white, how male, how heterosexual, and how privileged Frank is without having any idea.  The racial, sex, and gender politics that underpin this novel are cringe-worthy.  Except for Bosobolo, race is a relatively minor aspect of the novel.  All the “negro” characters, as he calls them, are minor or passing, and they all seem to think Frank is alright.  Frank is always keen to let us know he is alright.  The counterpoint to Frank is Walter Luckett, another recently-divorced white man in town who is going through a hard time.  Walter confides in Frank, much against Frank’s wishes, that Walter recently had an evening of conversation and sex with another professional man in the city.  Walter is clearly in crisis over what this means about him and his life.  Frank is cool and patient with Walter, letting him speak even as Frank is watching the clock and the door to figure out how quickly he can get out of the conversation.  He expresses non-judgment, even as his thoughts are full of judgment.  He plays the part alright, but we are privy to his real thoughts.  In the end, Frank rejects all attempts at connection and human contact, stating, “I simply found out that you couldn’t know another person’s life, and might as well not even try.”  There it is.  I can only know myself, so why bother to try to know anyone else or let anyone else try to explain him- or herself to me?  Alone and adrift, Walter fails to avoid ruin and ends his life by shooting himself.  Again, in the wake of Walter's death the reader gets to see that Frank’s sympathies are horrifyingly lacking.

Finally, the women in the book are all dismissed and condescended to by Frank.  While the women possess attitude and strength, generally, they are never important as individuals to Frank.  Frank is more interested, for example, in befriending Vicki’s father and brother than he is in the lastingness of his relationship with Vicki, just as he values his lasting relationship with his ex-wife’s father.  And for Frank, the thing that rights his Easter, after he has lost and been punched by Vicki, after Walter has shot himself and left a suicide note for Frank, after his ex-wife has told him that she doesn’t “like him very much at all”—the thing that rights all this and gives the day a happy ending, is that a cute blonde girl who is interning at the sports magazine approaches him who wears a “white cotton blouse concealing a pair of considerable grapefruits.”  I shit you not.  Frank, twice the girl’s age, flirts with her and sees that they get along great because they have “plenty to share—her admiration for me, my advice about her future, my admiration for her, her respect for my opinion (which may rival even her old man).”  There you have it, Frank’s relationships need.  She admires him, he as advice to give her, she respects his opinions, and she respect his opinions more than what he assumes must be the most important man in her life.  Frank, Frank, Frank.  Frank has no idea how limited he is.

The thing that makes it difficult to take is that it is never clear that Richard Ford has any awareness either.  Frank is instead presented as a kind of “Everyman,” and judging by his appearance in two more well-selling novels, it seems others have embraced him.

I suspect that there is an excellent analysis to be made by placing this book in its cultural time and place.  Frank says, without irony, that “[b]eing a man gets harder all the time.”  He might as well have said that being a white, heterosexual, middle-class, professional man gets harder all the time.  America was in a state of change in the mid-80s, as it is today, and a lot of this book feels like a reaction to, and resistance to, that change.  If someone writes (or has written) that analysis, please let me know. 

This same story told without all the racial, gender, and sexual bullshit could have been a compelling narrative.  But as it is, I would have been just as happy not reading it.

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.