Beautiful Losers

To finish The Adventures of Augie March was to be finished with it; that is, I was happier to begin reading Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, the fantasy-thriller selection of my brother’s, than to write about it. (I’ve made a summer reading seminar for this poor thirteen-year-old; we diagram sentences and learn “free indirect discourse.”) But weeks have passed, Artemis Fowl is blessedly over, and I now report, with brazen redundancy, that Augie March is too long.

It is not trite, however, to remark where the novel ought to have ended, and I think the finale “I am an American, Chicago born” overture could fit when Augie enlists, a point that needs body, in order to do something with the singing of America without nailing it down or, worse, simply shoving off to Europe. I'd also limit the repetition of Mr Bellow's introduction to those six words. I’m just as unconvinced by the idea of personality deciding fate (for Augie, doesn’t Chicago, America have something to do with it?) as I am of Mr Bellow deciding much about his novel. The flash and rhythm I so admired at the beginning is visceral, and one senses Mr Bellow’s pulse flagging through that ridiculous “Raft of the Medusa”-meets-Frankenstein shipwreck scene and through that sketchy Europe, until the author cinches it off. Was he merely tired? Couldn’t he think of what to do with Simon, didn’t he have energy to make Augie a father? This latter is enormously set up.

The women in Augie would be an interesting topic—most of the strong ones are evil, reminding me of Cathy in East of Eden and that lesbian dervish in American Pastoral, both stupidly flat thorns in the sides of rambling heroes—but I don't want to get into all that. I've thought more of Augie's loser appeal, a quality I previously supposed enjoyed only niche status. I mean, while writing my thesis I wondered about humor based on miserable situations, in such œuvres as This is Spinal Tap, Anthony Powell's first novel Afternoon Men, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, and, not least, BBC's "The Office." I had cut these out to suit only a certain specially morbid crowd, recently adding "Curb your Enthusiasm" to the lot, but here in Augie, right in the mainstream, is a loser winning our favor from getting in terrible binds.

But Mr Bellow's novel is not funny. Can we suppose that humor rushes in as grandeur goes out? Certainly not for the case of The Anatomy of Melancholy, but with those others I think (loser + craft - grandeur)(proper reader) = funny. In spite of all of the freewheeling apparent in Afternoon Men, This is Spinal Tap, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and dozens of my other favorites, wit necessitates marvellous construction.

Too Many Monkeys

From today's New York Times :

Peter Caruana, the chief minister of Gibraltar, said the government was trying to deal with monkeys that run amok. But the underlying problem is that there are too many monkeys.

"It's not that they are so clever," Mr Eric Shaw of Gibraltar's Natural History Society comments, "It's that we are thick."

Hercule Poirot, C'est moi.

Miss Rung has kindly suggested that I write a short and snappy editorial on the assumption that I am probably "reading something good now anyway." Poor Miss Rung, ever optimistic of my literary habits, is dead wrong at the moment. The last seven novels I have read this summer are murder mysteries, and none of even your Dan Brown pseudo-literary flavor either. Almost all involve strychnine, cyanide, or daggers to the heart. There is always the presence of one post-colonial old English general in a white suit who knows more than he lets on, a girl between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three with a penchant for kleptomania, and a worldy old woman who looks out for the younger, seeing in the charming thief a reflection of her earlier self, innocent to murder but not the stealing of silk stockings.

This is to say, in a snappy and shortish way, that I can only defend myself by asserting that I am at least finicky in my slumming: I read only Agatha Christie novels, preferably the older editions published by Dodd, Mead and Company in the 1960's, which feature pastel book jackets decorated with a single white celtic knot in the center, with a brief and energetic description of the first half of the plot on the first page in italics. And of this limited group, I read only those featuring the amateur sleuth Hercule Poirot-- I detest musty old Miss Marple and that awful Pyne whose Christian name I refuse to learn.

I will now impart a mantra I have taken on as a categorical imperative over the years: the more you know you are surrounding yourself with trash of a literary, gustatory, or musical nature, the more snobbish you ought to act about that trash. For example, if you happen to be craving a snack with high fructose corn syrup and that white goo they put in oreos, for heaven's sake be picky about your snack cake. The Little Debbie "Zebra Cake" is the only snack cake I will touch, I would never, for example, eat a packaged oatmeal cookie as a substitute. Similarly, everyone knows that the best cheap wine is Franzia: do not accept other wines in a box. Finally, do not read murder mysteries written by anyone who isn't British, over fifty, and a certified Dame.

I return to M. Hercule Poirot. We are familiar, I am sure, with the Belgian detective's moustache, his powers of deduction, and his taste for those sweet thick liquors that repulse dear old bumbling Hastings, who would rather have a pint, go about the traditional method of solving murders, and settle for a Twinkie if it came down to that. Poirot, he loves the missing link, using the little grey cells, finding the tiny bits of stories that do not fit and thereby unraveling such ingenious schemes as only Christie could dream up. Poirot appreciatesthe charms of real coquettes, as well as fashion and worldliness, and he is gratified by only the finest and richest food. Only his attitude toward murder does he himself describes as bourgeois. Running about Britain, the Continent, and several colonies, Poirot solves crimes impeccably dressed and better mannered. How could one possibly read a Dorothy Sayers novel, with stodgy Lord Peter Whats-his-name, after spending such long delightful hours with tasteful Poirot? One cannot and moreover, one must not.

If you, too, would like to spend languid hours with such a man, I am of the opinion that the following, in no particular order, are the greatest Christie novels: And Then There Were None, Hickory Dickory Death, Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Clocks (those interested in all things "meta" and "pomo" will enjoy this one), and After the Funeral. All perhaps standard choices, but for the reason that they are simply the best trash around.

Amis 'n' Augie

Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliché—whose jacket features the thin, greasy middle-aged author glaring indignantly at the reader from under the awning of some Jack Nicholson (or perhaps Kingsley Amis) eyebrows—contains, among other pieces from 1971-2000, the now famous essay in which Amis exudes that “The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further.” I turned to this essay last year, a few weeks after I had finished my own first reading of Bellow’s novel, still belly-deep in awe. Dedicated follower of hyperbole that I am, I was convinced that Mr. Amis, with his literary pedigree and Limey sneer, could accomplish what I had been unfit to do myself: articulate what I so admired in The Adventures of Augie March. But Amis, it turned out, was less interested in analyzing the novel for me than he was in splashing around the awe-pool with the rest of us. As a result, there is a staggering volume of textual quotation in the essay alongside precious little analysis. My thought at the time was that we turn to critics to explicate, to tease out what we are unable to tease ourselves. I was looking for answers I did not find in the text, and so Martin Amis’ ungarnished quotations soon began to feel less like teasing out than just plain teasing.

I recently returned to the essay in the light of Miss Rung’s post. My admiration for Bellow’s novel only grows in hindsight, and, unsurprisingly, Amis’ essay too makes more sense now.

It’s a pretty inexpensive claim to call something bad, but to call something Great is a far pricier affair. When Dale Peck says that “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,” for example, he is judging according to his own personal taste. A claim like that may make some waves, but it is ultimately a personal charge. A critic cannot rely upon personal taste, however, to claim that a work is representative or Great. A critic must appeal to a higher standard, a larger ideal if he is to make such a claim. What makes this difficult is that no larger single ideal exists. A work of art has no barometer for greatness.

Thus, there are several doubts that can be raised about the legitimacy of Amis’ proclamation. First of all, if it’s so hard to write the Great American Novel, such a mysterious odyssey to undertake, then can we assume that literary critics will be able to spot one if it ever comes along? There are surely no criteria for such a novel, no absolute checklists to follow in search for it. Moreover, if there are no definite criteria, then can the Great American Novel really exist? This is a tired question, but surprisingly, it is not a cliché upon which Mr. Amis wages any kind of war at all. The critic is decidedly unconcerned with precisely what his claim means and instead simply attempts to convince us that it is true. In a Marchian turn of events, this maneuver ends up being decently effective.

Amis calls the novel “loose” and “free” and quotes at length from its pages, but neatly (and sometimes frustratingly) avoids the trap of definition. For example, he suggests that Augie March is Great for its “fantastic inclusiveness.” Here he dodges the impulse to define what a Great American Novel must possess by claiming that this American Novel possesses everything.

Mr. Amis finds the Greatness of Augie in its resistance to critical engagement. “Literary criticism, as it is normally practiced,” Amis says, “will tend to get in the way of a novel like Augie March…As a critic, your job is to work your way round to the bits you want to quote.” The mark of the Great American novel, for Amis, is that it is unlike other American novels in some unquantifiable way. He says that this is the case because the book is about “life.” That may well be, but it’s better, I think, to leave the book’s plot undefined along with everything else. The canonization of a Great American Novel may be a piece of writing as elusive as the White Whale itself, and Mr. Amis’ essay, if it has done anything, has served to bring that point to the surface, to suggest that the greatest act of appreciation may well be, as he says, to “keep your mouth shut.”

Bellow-bellied

Ashamed to be on my way to Paris posing as a littérateur without having set eyes on Proust, but more embarrassed for never having read Saul Bellow or John Updike (besides the stories), I started The Adventures of Augie March about a week ago, and am mostly delighted. It is Augie who pauses “Ah…” in rapt nostalgia, but he skips headstrong through his brassy band of surrogate fathers and gold-hearted defeats, while we're the ones left breathless wondering how Mr Bellow manages to be so concise and doggone wordy at once.

Concision and wordiness are the elements of listing, a format that Mr Bellow uses often and with certain success:

a divinity over us, bald, whiskery, with a fat nose, greatly armored in a cutaway, a double-breasted vest, powerfully buttoned

direct a house, to command, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise, and intrigue in all her languages

a neck that had strained with pushing artillery wheels, a campaigner's red in the face, a powerful bite in his jaw and gold-crowned teeth, green cockeyes and soft short hair, altogether Napoleonic.

And all of these three lists appear on one page (five). Without the proper frame, such dense cataloguing can be trying in prose, while in poetry, where items rhymed and metered enjoy relations often greater than syntax, the effect is more often charming (I think of Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus”). Oddly, the lists of Augie’s immigrant Chicago suggest the earlier American-immigrant frontier, when bonneted women and their burly, suspendered husbands wrote things like "wagon axels, bullets, flour, lard, bucket of pickles..." to see whether they could afford the trip out West. Something about the expansiveness of self-betterment in both that rural, and Augie's urban time harmonize. As many have no doubt demonstrated, however, the America in this novel is a topic not to be addressed lightly. To continue, then, Mr Bellow makes his lists work with the novel’s larger pattern of shifting cadences—the lists flow fast and flush on the upbeat, while they clear out for just as sharp but heavy, short, unembellished sentences (such as when sweet Georgie’s dropped off at the Home*) on the downbeat.

Or it could be called point and counterpoint. The pattern intersects with a another framework that exercises our short memories while Augie bustles forth his long one—regular figures like Grandma Lausch and less-familiar ones like Clem Tambow appear unheralded, leaving us to recall, oftentimes with effort, what were their last digs and deeds. This mneumonic performance the reader finds himself practicing is like the one demanded by A Dance to the Music of Time, the series by Mr Bellow's contemporary, the English novelist Anthony Powell. (Mr Bellow has a stronger voice; Mr Powell beats him on form.) I'm tempted to make charts of plotted memory to see how metered the constructions are, that is, to see whether Grandma Lausch's appearances are somehow regular and whether her rhythm works regularly with Clem Tambows. For example. But I never have worked that out, and a more definite glimpse into how Mr Bellow records a memory is available, anyway, in the recent (April 25) article in The New Yorker, in which Philip Roth admirably cuts short the introduction to an archive of Mr Bellow's thoughts on Augie March and Seize the Day, then sets it down, unedited, long, and queerly repetitive.

I have more questions, and some criticism of Augie, but I’ll wait until I’m finished, after these last 275 pages, to discuss them. They’ll go fast, as my next installment of A Dance to the Music of Time arrived from amazon.co.uk yesterday (the handsome new Arrow paperbacks aren’t available here until later), and I’m aching for them.

*Augie needn't be down on the downbeat, but the slower tempo tends to denote high personal emotion. Augie loves Esther Fenchel at first sight, for example, on a downbeat; however, I find the happy bits weaker than the sad ones—though I suspect more convincing love will come around.