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[Thursday 3pm #32] The week in texts November 5, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Lionel Shriver, Paul Auster, film review, nonfiction.
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On Saturday night I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, famous for being Heath Ledger’s final film. (Interestingly, to me at least, my cousin is married to his cousin.) I’m always disappointed by Terry Gilliam films – they promise a lot, have fascinating moments and concepts, but are undisciplined, unfocused. The struggling travelling caravan of the immortal Dr Parnassus making its way around London is fascinating and the strange worlds of people’s fantasies as they enter his mirror are enjoyable. Just don’t expect too much sense.

On Tuesday night I watched Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 film The Wrestler. I was underwhelmed. It’s a well directed, well acted drama about a washed up wrestler who has nothing to live for but his wrestling, with a parallel drawn between his physical performance in the ring and those of his stripper friend. It is strongly realist, in stark contrast to his other films, Pi, Requiem for a Dream and Fountain, all of which are surreal.

On Wednesday I read in The Australian Literary Review with great interest a writer I like a lot – Lionel Shriver – writing about my favourite writer, Paul Auster. She claims to know his work quite well, and praises him as a great storyteller. She puts her finger on one important quality of his work:

The word “readable” doesn’t do this quality justice. Auster has such a sweet, clear, inviting voice that his novels go down like lemonade. While his characters are vivid, his genius is plot, of which readers of literary fiction are too often starved.

But she thinks he falls short of Philip Roth; unlike Roth, one comes away from Auster – she contends – with an ‘absence of an intellectual, psychological or political souvenir’. His stories are just stories – no meat, just lemonade.

Hmmm. I think she’s wrong. At his best, Auster has a lot of psychological insight into the way we live our lives, the way we respond to choices and circumstances. His souvenirs – for me – are existential, clues to the conduct of life. A sense that someone else lives in the kind of world I live in. But I think I know what she means.

All through the week I’ve been reading Don Watson’s book about America. I’ve been dissatisfied, even a narrative like this is no substitute for reading a novel at the same time. (I had just given up on Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book; I found her prose too annoying, slipping between colloquial and formal, and the feel of popular fiction, with its cliches and a certain kind of first person voice.) I have been thinking about moving to nonfiction for my next book after the library novel. I think it may bring together the two sides of my personality/ interests better than fiction – the researcher in me. But it wouldn’t be the kind of book Watson is writing. It would be less personal, and not have opinions in it.

Watson’s is a rambling travelogue, beautifully written, that keeps recurring around the centrality of fundamentalist Christianity to the experience of living in America. I have an endless fascination and horror with fundamentalist Christianity, and so I find this interesting, all the things he hears on the radio and sees on the telly, all the signs he sees about Jesus. There’s a lot more to it, of course, it’s just as much about politics and history and travel.

[Thursday 3pm #25] Endpoint and other poems : a dispatch from the afterlife September 17, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in John Updike, Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review, death, poetry.
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endpointReading John Updike’s final book, a collection of poems, is like receiving a dispatch from the afterlife.  The poems take us nearly up to the point of his death from lung cancer in January this year. He sent the manuscript off and then he died.

The cover photo has a poignancy to it, with its spontaneous, snapshot quality, the sombre ordinariness of it in its black and whiteness, and the sense that John is about to head off down a path we can’t follow him down, not yet.

The collection starts with the ‘Endpoint’ sequence that takes us through each of his last birthdays, starting with his seventieth in 2002, and then into his diagnosis and swift death. His thoughts range across his life, from childhood to old age, as he reflects on mortality, aging, memory. In 2005 he writes

A life poured into words – apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? (p.8)

In hospital, having learnt of his death he writes:

Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture which, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within, I lamely drown. (p. 23)

His final reflections are baldly honest.  His poetry is less ornate than his prose, and it makes him seem more vulnerable, frail. He has let me in on the final secret journey he took, which I only learned he had taken when his death was announced that hot, hot January day.

After the ‘Endpoint’ sequence, are pages and pages of other poems, as if to say John is not really dead, as if to say he’s still alive like he should be, like I thought he would be.

[Thursday 3pm #13] A weekend of assassination texts : Libra, JFK and Death of a President June 25, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Don DeLillo, book review, film review, history, politics.
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On Saturday, I finished DeLillo’s Libra and the Kennedy assassination was going through my mind so much, I was desperate to finally watch JFK. But Nicole had already seen it, so I also got out Death of a President as well, a mock documentary made in 2006 about the assassination of George W. Bush. Death of a President was so weak, Nicole went to bed after half an hour and I turned it off to start watching JFK. I stayed up late, but still only got halfway through. I woke up early and put it on at 7am to watch the second half, the earliest I’ve ever seen a film. I think I was dreaming about it all.

Libra and JFK make for interesting comparison. DeLillo uses the contradictions and paradoxes of the assassination and of what we know of Lee Oswald to create a complex situation and a paradoxical character, represented by the scales of Libra – a man weighing contradictory things at the same time, ready to tip one way or the other. The paradoxes make for a postmodern novel, a postmodern character, a postmodern world like DeLillo always evokes.

In JFK, Stone takes the same contradictions and paradoxes and irons them out with a much more elaborate conspiracy theory. A surface reading makes it much more convincing than DeLillo’s vision, but that is exactly because it is so neat, so unwilling to accept that the truth of JFK’s assassination might be impossible to get to.

So, for example, what are we to make of Oswald setting up a pro-Castro organisation in the same building as Guy Bannister, a far-right private detective working against Castro? For DeLillo, it is about Oswald’s own contradictions, wanting attention and taking it wherever he can get it, giving some information to FBI agents, applying for work with a  man like Guy Bannister – anything to get noticed. For DeLillo, pro- and anti- Castro forces in this context are not opposing forces, but two sides of the scales, the same type of men, disenchanted, extreme men. In Libra, Oswald doesn’t know what he actually wants, beyond being listened to, glory, vindication of his genius, of his confused view of the world. And this, in its own way, is utterly convincing.

Stone’s interpretation of the same event? Jim Garrison, the DA heading the New Orleans investigation, sees it as clear proof that Oswald is not a communist at all, but an undercover agent for a nefarious coalition of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, all three with offices within a block of the building. Which, in the context of a conspiracy thriller is, in its own way, utterly convincing.

While Libra is a brilliant novel and JFK is an excellent film, Death of a President is a competent waste of time. It has the exact feel of what a decent, uninspired documentary might be like if George W. Bush had been assassinated in 2007. As I watched, I imagined how fooled a class of sixteen year olds would be in a few years if I was an English teacher showing it to them. It has all the tedious overnarration and overexplanation of certain documentaries, intercutting each action scene with interviews with key players. Utterly convincing; but because we know none of it happened, rather boring.

It needed an edge to it. Think Woody Allen’s Zelig, the fake documentary of a man with chameleon abilities who manages to make it into every significant event of the early twentieth century. It was worthwhile because it was funny, the fake documentary had a purpose.

But they didn’t have to make this one funny. They could have made it hallucinatory and surreal, using the plausibility of the documentary style to lead the viewer not just over a tedious fake assassination but one with outrageous elements. Or it could have been political, with some interesting point about either Bush or the anti-Bush protestors, about what it meant for a country to live under his rule for eight years. But it studiously avoided doing this. It did exactly what it was trying to do and gets marks for that, but what it was trying to do was so unremarkable.

[Thursday 3pm #11] My thunder stolen : a sequel to the Catcher in the Rye June 11, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in J.D. Salinger, Library of Babel, Thursday 3pm feature posts.
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Having turned 90 in January, J.D. Salinger is in the news, suing an author who calls himself J.D. California to prevent him publishing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called ‘60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye’.

The novel already appears for pre-sale on Amazon. The publisher is of dubious reputation, and the buzz around the book itself is not positive. If anyone was going to try to pull this off, it would have to be brilliant. As the title suggests, this sequel starts with Holden at 76, apparently losing his marbles and revisiting New York City.

In 2004 on my old blog (which was lost forever when the modblog servers went down permanently back in 2006) I wrote a creative post about a sequel to the The Catcher in the Rye called Holden Rides Again. In my post, I had obtained the manuscript from a girl who was romantically linked with J.D. Salinger’s son, Matty (star of an infamously bad telemovie version of Captain America – I’m not joking, this much is true). I gave a plot outline for the manuscript and was pleased when one person left a comment saying they couldn’t wait for it to be published for real.

J.D. Salinger has said that Holden exists only in the covers of the book; that there’s no more to tell. But for so many fans, myself included, that’s not true. I would love for him to have come alive for longer, to have read more of his adventures, to have found out how such a distraught youth might live the rest of his life.

In The Library of Babel, my new novel, the new draft actually starts with Tom finding a manuscript copy of J.D. Salinger’s sequel to Catcher in the Rye in the rare book room of the library. It’s a move that I’m in two minds about; I don’t want to dwell forever in the shadow of Catcher (characters reference it in my first novel; and originally in my second, one of the characters was named after Jane Gallagher, but this is gone now). But the point was something else – the sequel is about what happens when the angsty sixteen year old has to grow up. What comes next? What comes after deciding everyone’s a phony?

I wanted to situate my novel as an exploration of these themes. I have consciously left behind themes of adolescence and want to write about the mid to late twenties, and the challenges of living at peace with the world, while still trying to be authentic.

I may have to rethink using the sequel to Catcher in the Rye at all. In case it gets edited out, and in light of J.D. California’s hype, here’s my sequel to Catcher in the Rye, in the form of chapter four of the Library of Babel:

Holden rides again

Have a read and then vote in the poll, just like reality TV:

In defence of Holden June 9, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in J.D. Salinger, reading.
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Holden Caulfield that is, star of The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not old enough or mature enough yet to renounce my love of this book. It’s my favourite book. But reading this review of The Catcher in the Rye today disturbed me. He’s not deep, she argues; his version of deep is to dismiss the whole world as phony and have a nervous breakdown. If you think that’s profound you’re still adolescent.

Actually, I’m not going to leap to the defence of Holden. I haven’t the energy. But I think I will be horrified if, like the reviewer Kathy, I ever get to the point of renouncing Holden and everything that book has meant to me over the years.

The last time I re-read it in 2005 I had finally come out of an adolescent posture of defying the whole world, and I still loved it. It’s not just profound, Catcher in the Rye, it’s also beautiful and funny, and that counts even if you think you’ve outgrown Holden’s ‘phony’ insights.

Maybe it’s time to read again. See if I’ve grown up yet.

Buttering the toast : DeLillo capturing the everyday June 9, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Don DeLillo, writing.
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In my writing, I want to find beauty in everyday life. I don’t manage this very often. Don DeLillo does it very well. I was smiling to myself reading the first few pages of Libra, smiling with private delight in the wonder of his pages, the intricacies, defamilarisations, astute observations.

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion. (16)

I haven’t put flesh like this on the scenes I’m writing at the moment. They’re bare bones skeletons, they don’t live and breathe, they haven’t been called into being with deep acts of imagination.

Author photos of Americans June 8, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors.
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Has anyone else ever thought that the dust-jacket author photos of Americans have a certain look? That they tend to stare into the camera with a certain insistence and boldness which others lack?

A Tolstoyian project May 21, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Leo Tolstoy, link.
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Following on from last week’s review of War and Peace, I stumbled upon a wonderful blog reviewing a chapter a day of War and Peace – http://relentlesspursuit.wordpress.com. Matthew from Sydney is the dogged reviewer, and he’s nearly finished. It’s the sort of quixiotic project that delights me.

Why do I like Paul Auster’s Moon Palace so much? April 9, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in Paul Auster, life.
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(This is not the eagerly anticipated 3pm weekly post, but something I wrote in January and meant to turn into a long long piece before publishing. Think of it as your pre 3pm entree, but don’t get put off because it probably will mean little unless you’ve read any of Auster.)

The youthful quest for identity and meaning is literalised into the quest for survival and in doing so perhaps it resonates with my own romantic visions of being young and feeling alone in the world. The threat of starvation, living in a cave in Central Park, surviving by selling off secondhand books, the determination to do nothing all to save oneself – all exaggerated literalisations of my own early twenties, of being a student and then being unemployed for a time.

In relying on co-incidences as a major plot device and drawing meaning from parallels and intersections, Moon Palace seems to offer a fresh way of making sense of the world. Every narrative reduces the complexity of the world to a narrative logic of some order and coherence, but it’s the freshness of Auster which shines so brightly in this novel. Life seems full of the leaps and co-incidences and intersections out of which M.S. Fogg makes sense of life.

I love the way M.S. and Effing both give life meaning by setting themselves crazy projects. M.S. reading every book of Uncle Victor’s and in this way paying tribute to Victor’s life. Effing giving away to strangers the stolen money he found decades earlier. M.S. and Sol setting out to find the cave Effing hid in. I think reading this and echoes in other Auster’s works gave me a similar tendency from 2001 onwards.

Honour and dishonour: the fate of two contemporaries, Cormac McCarthy and John Updike February 4, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors.
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The contrast between the fates of two great American novelists, Cormac McCarthy (1933-) and John Updike (1932-2009) is a picture of the ironies of fame and writing.

McCarthy was for years a cult figure, a reclusive, difficult writer who some writers and critics proclaimed as a dark genius but who the public stayed away from. He was named at one stage as ‘the best undiscovered novelist of his generation’. For me, his masterpiece Blood Meridian and his brilliant Border Trilogy were secret countries I was so proud to have visited when the world at large knew nothing of them.

When he finally published another novel in 2005, No Country For Old Men, one reviewer stated that at 72, it was probably the last we would hear from him. But he came straight back with the post-apocalyptic novel The Road in 2006, and, far from the swansong of an obscure writer, Oprah Winfrey picked it up for her book club. Suddenly middle aged ladies across the USA and Australia were reading the dark Texan master and discussing him over glasses of champagne.

Things didn’t stop there; the Coen brothers made one of their most critically acclaimed films ever from No Country and when the film of The Road finishes production, McCarthy hype will be at fever pitch.  All this from a man who writes of a cruel world which wipes out hope from the bravest men and knows no happy endings. McCarthy’s success is incongruous; he is meant to be the writer’s writer, the test of a reader’s pedigree. But what a perfect late career he has had. I think any writer would choose a path like his, as against what happened to poor Updike.

Updike achieved fame and critical success early; Rabbit, Run was published when he was just 28 and was the first of his brilliant Rabbit quartet. The world was amazed by the brilliance of his prose and no-one through the sixties and seventies depicted upper-middle America with such elegance and warmth.

Yet it must be nearly impossible to stay on the right side of the critics and also be prolific. Who has ever managed? The critics seem to like the enigmatic writer releasing the occasional novel after years of silence; much more exciting than the steady prolificy of an Updike, a new novel year after year. It became a requirement that critics accuse him of being tired or tiresome, of never breaking new ground, of being all beautiful prose and no substance. There’s something to the accusations; he did write about adultery a little too much, but he was also constantly experimenting with very different genres, from his own attempt at science-fiction – Toward the End of Time – to Terrorist. He didn’t just write about adultery in New England!

So after the praise heaped on his masterpiece, Rabbit at Rest (1991), it was all downhill for Updike. It was as if he had died with Rabbit. He kept on writing, he kept on publishing, he kept up his good humour and warmth for the world and for upper-middle America, but it didn’t reward him back. And then, ignominy of ignominies, after the lukewarm reviews of his final (humous) novel, The Widows of Eastwick, the last award he received was a lifetime achievement award for writing the world’s worst sex scenes. Unjustified, when even if he wrote too much about sex, he wrote about it with originality, beauty and humour.

Which writer, on the balance, would want to be in Updike’s shoes? Lauded early and gently scorned late, always compared unfavourably to earlier works. Poor Updike; he believed in the goodness of the world; he had a gently humorous touch even as he wrote of his fear of death and the mundane struggles of middle class life. And unlike McCarthy, he didn’t get a happy ending to his career.

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