You Don't Love Me Yet

After a heavy read like "Blood Meridian," I tried to ease up a bit and read something a little more lighthearted. Glancing at my shelf, I saw a book I had found in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble, got excited about and bought, and then instantly forgot about - Jonathan Lethem's 2007 novel "You Don't Love Me Yet."

The book follows a few months in the life of Lucinda Hoekke, tracing the rise and fall of her unnamed band. As the novel begins, she is working for an abstract artist answering and documenting phone call complaints. In her free time, she jams with a band which seems to have a lot of potential (in terms of character), but which hasn't written a breakthrough song, or even played a gig. One day she gets a call from a complainer (a recurring complainer, in fact), and she falls in love with him. During the conversations of their affair, she picks up on several unique phrases - such as "monster eyes" - which inspire her to help write some lyrics which eventually become the bands strongest song. The band gets their first gig at a failed art experiment which morphs into a real party and gets them some positive attention Unfortunately, the complainer was also at the party, and leverages his creation of many of their lyrics into making the band let him join. The complainer then sabotages the band's radio appearance, and they miss their big chance. Yet, in the end, everyone is paired off and happy.

(Oh yeah, and somewhere in the book is a subplot about the guitar player kidnapping a kangaroo from the LA zoo and the zoo denying it to save face.)

The book's biggest limitation was the inability to actually hear the band. Very little is ever even said about how their music would sound - there is a distinct lack of sensory detail for the reader's ears (if that makes sense, somehow).

I remember that there was a lot of negative feedback for Lethem when the book came out. And not undeserved, I can confidently say. This novel pales in comparison to his other novels, and isn't even in the same league as his masterpiece - "The Fortress of Solitude."

But, on the other hand, this novel never really aspires to be that type of book. So how can we complain when it doesn't achieve it? It's more like the outline for a romantic comedy with a twist-of-Lethem (mostly in the names of the characters). It

I can say that it was a nice, smooth read, and that it didn't require a lot of thinking - unlike "Walden" and "Blood Meridian." I can't say that it belongs on the same shelf as those books, though. It doesn't. It just doesn't.

Blood Meridian

It took me a while to slug through it, but I finally finished reading Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel "Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West." It was a brutal read, both in regards to the text and the mental energy expended to read it, but I finish it with a sense of smugness that I have tackled some literary monster.

The book loosely follows the journeys of a character known only as "the kid" and traces his life around his encounters with the antagonist character - Judge Holden (almost exclusively referred to as "the judge"). The two characters' fates are irreversibly intertwined after the judge rescues the kid from a Mexican prison in return for the kid joining the judge's band of scalp-hunters. Most of the novel then follows the scalp-hunters killing sprees, until they are finally ambushed and mostly killed. The few survivors are hunted down, one-by-one, by the judge, until the kid is the only one left. (At this point, the kid is suddenly referred to as "the man" - suggesting that he is beyond the edge of innocence.) In the final scene, the judge has tracked down the kid / the man down in Texas and, although the kid's fate is left unknown and ambiguous, we are left with the impression that the judge has slaughtered him too.

To me, "Blood Meridian" hearkens back to an earlier era of writing - to the era of Herman Melville and (to an extent) Joseph Conrad. Much of the writing is consumed by descriptions of the landscape and weather, with the characters merely traversing these settings. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, with most of the conversations being short and consisting of questions and responses. Yet, eventually, we learn about our characters, even though they are not necessarily the foreground of the picture much of the time. Extended metaphors are also a rarity (which fits with the characters of the novel who are mostly uneducated grunts). The book has a few "extended monologues" though, which remind me of Conrad's regular narrator of Marlowe. This style, then, is well-crafted and exhibits McCarthy's fantastic ability to manipulate the written word to serve his purpose, and it is evident why many critics view "Blood Meridian" as his masterpiece.

The character of Judge Holden was brutal but beautifully created. He is, among all the characters, the one who transcends the intelligence of all the others. He keeps a journal where he documents everything he comes across, trying to learn as much as he can about everything he can. He uses logic and reasoning with the rest of the gang, who are often confused by his statements. Yet, he is also an inherently evil character. It is implied repeatedly (including through his relationship with the kid) that he is a pedophile, and it is explicit that he is a child murderer and a calculated homicidal maniac. He repeatedly refers to the pervasiveness of violence throughout culture, claiming at one point (in essence) that men are not men if they have not been to war and drawn blood. To me, he represents the devil in all his deception and violence. There is even a moment when, while explaining why he documents everything he sees and does, the judge declares that the fact that anything exists without his permission and beyond his control is an insult to him - which reminds me of a passage from Milton's "Paradise Lost" (although I cannot recall the line verbatim).

The novel's ambiguous ending - with the kid's fate left unresolved - was quite a shock to me. Although much of the action of the book had been left ambiguous, I suppose I was expecting some kind of secure resolution, some sense of closure. Yet, the lack of clarity is also a fitting ending to a book which moves through a haze of uncertainty - we're never quite sure where exactly the kid came from, why he was chosen by the judge, what happens to many of the characters. The only thing we know for certain at the end is that the judge survives in all his madness (perhaps still survives, the last line suggests - adding to the impression that he is an evil beyond the earth).

One final note: although much of the action of the book is implied, most of the descriptions of locations and scenes of the book are incredibly explicit. This detail includes the slaughter, dismemberment, and scalping of several people. McCarthy's prose leaves nothing to the imagination in regards to the brutality of these based-on-reality events. This novel is not for the feint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach. I found this brutality interesting, though, in contrast with the way death is treated in most westerns (especially in film). More often than not, someone is shot with a puff of smoke and falls over stiffly. In reality, though, bodies were disfigured, ears and scalps kept as souvenirs, and conflicts were bloody and messy. McCarthy does not stray from reality, and the reader is left with a few horrific images to think about.

Walden

(Although this post is a few months late, I still felt I should put it up, if only to document my reading habits.)

I finished the summer by reading Henry David Thoreau's key project "Walden; or Life in the Woods." In all honesty, I could not tell you what impulse moved me to read this book at this point in my life, other than the random chance that it was sitting on my bookshelf at an opportune moment. I had read it once while I was in high school, but that was mainly to show myself as a pseudo-intellectual and not because I had any real interest in the philosophies and musings scribed by Thoreau. In fact, until I re-read this book, the most detail I could have given in review would have been "it's about a guy who lives in the woods by himself for a while and thinks a lot about life and happiness." (Actually, it would have been quite impressive of my high school self if I could have written even that much about it.)

The book chronicles, in only a general chronological order, a period in Thoreau's life in which he abandoned the shackles of city life to begin anew in a self-built cabin by Walden Pond. During this period, he works to prove that a person can be almost completely self-sufficient, needing minimal contact with society and even that only for social purposes and not for physical or personal sustenance. He builds his own cabin (from the remains of another cabin), grows his own food (mostly beans) and lives the ultimate simple life. He provides us with some interesting insights into our own lives, calling us to examine how much we really need to survive. (Ultimately, though, he does return to civil society, but as a renewed and completely transformed man.)

Thoreau's book is well-written and very powerful. There are a few moments where I had to realize that this wasn't just some fun experiment for him, but was a total surrendering of his life to his personal beliefs. In these moments, though, Thoreau becomes a bit preachy and self-righteous. (Anyone who can completely sustain their life with no income aside from occasionally selling some leftover bean crop has the right to be self-righteous, I suppose.)

I am very intrigued by his ideas of poverty being a form of wealth. From my understanding, Thoreau viewed owning an item - let's say, a bookshelf - as a form or reverse possession as well. You may move the bookshelf wherever you like, but you bound to that bookshelf through your ownership. The more you own, then, the more you are tied down. Especially interesting was his discussion of the costs of simply going anywhere. A man who walks across the country could get coast-to-coast faster (according to Thoreau) than a man taking a train (or, in modern times, driving or flying), assuming that both men start with nothing. The man who chooses to walk has to pay nothing, but the man who drives must pay for the car and gas for the car, as well as for his place to live while he works and saves the money to pay for the car and gas.

The question that comes to my mind, immediately, is the possible applications to the modern world. Thoreau's ideas would be in direct opposition to our contemporary consumer-based society (somewhat gelled by the current economic crisis), which, in some ways, would paint him as a socialist or communist. Yet, "Walden" takes no such political position. (Thoreau's other great work "Civil Disobedience" would take an incredibly conservative position in regards to politics, but that is another essay for another day.) The book merely presents the epitome of the American ideal of "rugged individualism." Including the doomed experiment of Christopher McCandless (documented well in the book and movie "Into the Wild"), most modern "rugged individualists" are often part of a lunatic-fringe with no real philosophical base. Somewhere between then and now, the true spirit of Throeau's experiment was distorted.

Finally, as with all non-fiction, we must question the authenticity of Thoreau's writings. Every writer has a purpose in writing. Thoreau's was to prove that a man needs no support from society or government to thrive. So, we must ask, was anything exaggerated to prove his point? Was any part of his experience conveniently left out? I imagine that any winter cold enough to freeze Walden Pond would be cold enough to make most people incredibly uncomfortable - yet Thoreau's discussion of the winter time makes it seem as though the weather were mild.

I'm glad I re-read this book. It was a refreshing way to end the summer, and it has given me a lot to think about though the fall and winter.