For my next trick, I will review three completely unrelated books at the same time. Normally, as I have noted elsewhere, my book reviews are very shallow. I rarely have anything more to say than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.”
Why do I like something, or not? Usually it’s the story. If the story is good, then I like the book. But I can also be taken in by good writing. If the writing really soars, I can overlook a weak story. And then there’s the entertainment factor. Although I sometimes lean that way, I’m really not one of those literary snobs that feel a book can’t be good if one doesn’t have to suffer to get through it.
Social relevance can be a factor as well, but for me cannot stand on its own. I have no interest in reading a book that is socially relevant but doesn’t tell a good story, isn’t well-written, or has no entertainment value. On the other hand, if a book meets any of the above criteria and has social relevance to boot, then so much the better.
"Watching the performances of my former colleagues, I got the idea that once you assembled the requisite props, the piece would more or less come together on its own. The inflatable shark naturally led to the puddle of heavy cream, which, if lapped from the floor with slow steady precision, could account for up to twenty minutes of valuable stage time. All you had to do was maintain a shell shocked expression and handle a variety of contradictory objects. It was the artist’s duty to find the appropriate objects and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours." -- David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
That paragraph pretty much sums up Sedaris’s book. He tells no story. The book reads like a series of writing assignments in which the author is challenged to take an anecdote from real life and embellish it to make it funny. So he takes a little of this, a little of that, throws in a healthy dose of exaggeration and there you have it. The writing is good but not exceptional. It has no social relevance whatsoever. But the anecdotes are entertaining and the book is an enjoyable read. Since the anecdotes are short and there is no plot or any kind of continuity, it’s a good book to read on the subway or john.
"On the buildings the names hung there as if by magic. In the windows of stores they were spread out in an unruly mess, this pure chaos, sick madness, as if tossed into a garbage heap. And the citizens walked the streets, alone, in comfortable pairs, in ragged groups, with their true names blazing over their hearts, without pride or shame, plainly, for this new arrangement was just and true.
Now he was in the Crossroads of the World, as this place had come to be called. The names here were magnificent, gigantic, powered by a million volts and blinking in malevolent dynamism. Off the chart. The most powerful names of all lived here and it was all he could do to stare. He had entered the Apex." -- Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt
Several years ago I read The Intuitionist by Whitehead. The premise was fascinating and I thought it was a great novel through about two thirds of it. Although it kind of fell apart towards the end, the writer showed great promise. Apex Hides the Hurt doesn’t exactly fall apart at the end, but it does wrap things up a bit too neatly. The story is interesting. The writing seems forced and/or over-edited, but it is serviceable and good in places. It is moderately entertaining in a literary way. I’m not sure if the story has any social relevance, but it certainly has the pretense of social relevance. All in all, my reaction is lukewarm, but since it’s short and easy to read, I’m comfortable recommending it to anyone interested in literature. I think the author has the potential to truly pull off something great one day.
"It is not right for us to scorn this past since we are still in the very earliest phase of a recovery from it. We sit on a hillside and cannot name the trees, there are simply too many. We look up and cannot name the butterflies, they are too colorful. We walk through the forest and forget the need for names as the flowers hang over our heads. We are on the edge of finding a place." -- Charles Bowden, The Secret Forest
Notice how I selected that quote to contrast with Whitehead? Not only in the obvious way -- how one writes about naming things and the other writes about the inability to name things, but also in the ease that the words flow in Bowden’s writing vs. the feeling of strenuous exercise you sense behind Whitehead’s prose. I know of no writer today who can dash off genuinely great prose with such seaming ease. Even a relatively minor work like The Secret Forest is filled with amazing sentences and sublime paragraphs. And Bowden tells a story, an important story, but he does not tell it in any kind of traditional form. He has seen too much. He knows too much. The little known reality of the southwest (or northwest, depending on your perspective) deserts that he knows so well is ill-suited to the temporal, much less the linear story. But the story is there. Like the forest, it can be a blur of shadow and light, of night and day and dusk and dawn. Valleys and streams lead off in all directions, sometimes they dead end at beautiful waterfalls, sometimes at shallow graves. And the story, like the forest, is not just flora and fauna. Real people live there leading otherwise unsung and anonymous lives. There are is not beginning or end, only beginnings and endings.
If you are unfamiliar with Charles Bowden, I very much recommend you get acquainted. His books can be hard to find because he does not really fit into any category. So you may find him under environmental books or crime of possibly general non-fiction and sometimes Photography (he often collaborates with photographers). Blues for Cannibals is a good place to start. Blue Desert, Desierto, and Blood Orchid work would work as well.
Okay, you've read this far, let Chuck have the last word:
We need new answers and our old answers only get in the way. They are like those Sabbath values nineteenth-century writers like Mark Twain always made fun of -- pieties we tell others but that we make sure do not confine our own lives and habits. We've got a pantry full of junked words like progress, development, capitalism, communism, industrialism, and environmentalism and, if we really get desperate, we haul out that old favorite, lifestyle. We prefer this rhetoric to facing a rather simple problem: In a world where almost everyone is poor, our species takes things faster than they are replaced. And whether one heads into the forest with a machete or a two-hundred-dollar backpack, this simple fact does not change.
Yep.
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