All The Pretty Wombats

I've been reading All The Pretty Horses.  About it, I would say that if you like the following passage--if you find it beautiful and true--you should read the book.  

He rode through La Vega without dismounting, the horse blowing and rolling its eyes at all it saw.  When a truck started up in the street and began to come toward them the animal moaned in despair and tried to turn and he sawed it down almost onto its haunches and patted it and talked constantly to it until the vehicle was past and then they went on again.  Once outside the town he left the road altogether and set off across the immense and ancient lakebed of the bolson.  He crossed a dry gypsum playa where the salt crust stove under the horse's hooves like trodden isinglass and he rode up through white gypsum hills grown with stunted datil and through a pale bajanda crowded with flowers of gypsum like a cavefloor uncovered to the light.  In the shimmering distance trees and jacales stood along the slender bights of greenland pale and serried and half fugitive in the clear morning air.  The horse had a good natural gait and as he rode he talked to it and told it things about that world that were true in his experience and he told it things he thought could be true to see how they would sound if they were said.  He told the horse why he liked it and why he'd chosen it to be his horse and he said that he would allow no harm to come to it. 

I will say, as well, that I had to look up six words in this paragraph (two of which appear in no Spanish or English dictionary I own) and also that if I stopped to look up every word that I didn't know, reading this book, I would probably still be on page 50.  

Human Voices

The British writer Penelope Fitzgerald is an underrated master.  Everybody should read her work.  I would recommend especially: The Blue Flower, Offshore, Innocence, and Human Voices.  If it's not enough that her novels are wise, funny, and rife with fantastically well-turned phrases, everything she wrote is under 200 pages.   Most of it's under 150.  So it's not a huge commitment.

Her books don't have to be long because they are so dense with observation and insight.  I think the following passage, from Human Voices, should make that clear.  The book is set in England during World War II, at the BBC.  "Sam" is a senior excecutive, in charge of recording technologies.  The "Controllers" are the heads of the BBC.  "Wolseleys" are cars.

At the time of the Munich Agreement a memo had been sent round calling, as a matter of urgency, for the recording of the country's heritage.

It was headed Lest we forget our Englishery.  Sam had disappeared for over two weeks in one of the Wolseleys, pretty infirm even at that time, with an engineer and an elderly German refugee, Dr Vogel--Dr Vogel, cruelly bent, deaf in one ear, but known to be the greatest expert in Europe on recorded atmosphere.

There was not much hope of commonsense prevailing.  Dr Vogel, in spite of his politeness and gentle ganz meinherheits, was an obsessive, who had been seen to take the arms of passers-by in his bony grip and beg to record their breathing, for he wished to record England's wheezing before the autumn fogs began.  'Have the goodness, sir, to cough a little into my apparatus.'  Sam thought the idea excellent.

The expedition to the English countryside arrived back with a very large number of discs.  The engineer who had gone with them said nothing.  He went straight away to have a drink.  It was probably a misfortune that the Controllers were so interested in the project that they demanded a playback straight away.  Usually there was a judicious interval before they expressed any opinion, but not this time.

'What we have been listening to--patiently, always in the hope of something else coming up--amounts to more than six hundred bands of creaking.  To be accurate, some are a mixture of squeaking and creaking.'

'They're all from the parish church of Hither Lickington,' Sam explained eagerly.  'It was recommended to us by Religious Broadcasting as the top place in the Home Counties.  What you're hearing is the hinges of the door and the door itself opening and shutting as the old women come in one by one with the stuff for the Harvest Festival.  The quality's superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so.  Some of them have got more to carry, so the door has to open wider.  That's when you get the squeak.'

'Hark, the vegetable marrow comes!' cried Dr Vogel, his head on one side, well contented.

There's so much in here that I love, but I would especially note: "patiently, always in the hope of something else coming up"; "the quality's superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so"; and the final line--"Hark, the vegetable marrow comes!'"  It's funny and it's kind, and, yes, British eccentricity is hardly the newest subject in the world, but Fitzgerald does it better than just about anyone, at least anyone who wrote in the last hundred years.

The Crying Of Lot 49, Pt. I

One of the advantages of having smart, literary friends (besides always having people to drink with, and rail against life's indignities in ways that involve quoting Patrick O'Brian) is being able to discuss books with them. Recently, two such friends (Seb and Jack) engaged with me via email in a discussion of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. I found the exchange illuminating and inspiring. With the permission of both writers, I publish it (slightly edited) here below.

* * *

Seb writes:

.... I hated The Crying of Lot 49. Hated it. Throughout my reading I recalled a conversation about the respective merits of Horace and Ovid with Justin's friend Michael. Michael furnished an articulate and very cogent argument in favor of Horace, a man whose work is as amenable to casual conversation as it is to lasting friendship. Ovid, Michael insisted, is very clever but in the last analysis little more.

This analysis captures my first impression of Pynchon. He is certainly a precocious and very talented writer, but he seems to me predictable and (worst of all literary sins) tedious. I have no cause to doubt Tim's verdict that Pynchon writes circles around DeLillo, but from what little DeLillo I have read, that, as our friend Mr. Dreyer likes to say, "ain't setting the bar too high." I found myself wondering, despite Pynchon's capable description of the drug, how many of his admirers have ever used LSD-25.

Tim warned me I would not like the book if I did not find it funny; though names such as Genghis Cohen, KCUF, and K. da Chingado ought to have amused me, for whatever reason I found them puerile coming from a writer of such skill. If you will permit me the liberty of a rather strange metaphor, reading The Book of the New Sun was a volatile affair with an intransigent, mendacious woman whose intellect beggared my own and whose surpassing beauty was only visible when she held her head against the light at a very specific angle. By comparison, my trudge through The Crying of Lot 49 seemed a date with a elegant and whorish débutante whose complacent East-Coast banter trilled an exquisitely phrased discourse about nothing at all, and I was constantly looking at my watch, willing the night to end. Though she revealed an alluring phantasm of personality as I bowed my farewell, I crumpled her number and banished it to the back of my wallet among the many slips of paper I will ultimately discard.

Seb

* * *
Jack replies....

Sebastian,

Perhaps our difference of opinion is more than literary--the trilling debutante whom you'd casually discard would, for me, become a passion and then a madness and eventually a treasured and hated failure. As for her counterpart, the brilliant and volatile beauty, I would likely overlook her, as I don't spend enough time in places with natural light. Query: Do men who like certain kinds of books prefer certain kinds of women? Do women know that readers of certain authors are more likely to favor particular characteristics or natures? I shall read only Erica Jong, Ernest Hemingway, and Sigmund Freud henceforth, and I shall read them in public places, hopefully.

I am not sure, however, that The Crying of Lot 49 is best characterized as a polished but insubstantial society girl, or even a manque Dorothy Parker. To the contrary, I think that its "exquisitely phrased discourse" (nicely said) is saturated with humor, caustic observation, and feeling. Rather than saying it's about nothing at all, I'd say it's about Oedipa's confrontation with nothing at all, as her odyssey reveals, or perhaps creates, an unexpected world (and an unexpected Oedipa) in counterpoise to the empty lunatic calm of her daily life. For purposes of giving the novel a female avatar, then, I'd have to go with someone like a grad student in English who tends bar on weekends and wonders why she's always bored.

Tim hits the nail on the head in saying that the novel doesn't work if you don't find it funny. Unlike many of Pynchon's fans, I do not think that the peculiar names are all that good. I do think that the songs are. Best of all, though, are the set-piece scenes and the characterizations. Metzger's seduction of Oedipa while they watch the submarine drama is one; the continuation of their affair to the tuneful strummings of "The Paranoids" is another. Inverarity's encounter with an upset PANista on a Mexican beach is a third. Shot throughout the novel are the oddnicks, loners, obsessives, cripples, weirdos, and outcasts who rely on WASTE for their secretive communications, a set treated lovingly and hilariously. The ludicrousness behind the minatory facade of Yoyodyne and the post office and the suburban paradise with a bone-bottomed lake is essential.

An under-appreciated aspect of the book is its emotive power. Pynchon's descriptions of banality and heartbreak are unerringly authentic. My favorite instance, and one of my favorite instances in Pynchon's repertoire, is the explanation of Mucho's dread of used car dealerships. As you'll recall, he worked in one and hated the reputation that came with it, to say nothing of the disconsolate task of cleaning up other people's throw-aways. The description of the hopelessness of those cars, and by extension their owners, is as fine and true a piece of writing as I know. Mucho's abhorrence of the used-car salesman look (wide lapels, big grin, greased hair) and his insistence on using only water on his own scalp is masterful depiction. His inability to commit himself to KCUF and his subsequent personal destruction by way of LSD, resulting in Oedipa's final alienation, also come to mind as examples of Pynchon's concern for the human affairs. I also love the entire Inamorati Anonymous sequence, which resonates true and sad.

I mention these particular passages and qualities because I think they're often over-looked in discussions of the book, which tend to focus on its relationship to post-modernism as either icon or critique. Bandying about the term "post-modernism" is dangerous to anyone not in the trenches of critical theory, but I'll use it here in a very simple sense, as a reaction against the dominant intellectual, social, governmental, and artistic hierarchies that existed during and immediately after the Second World War. In that sense The Crying of Lot 49 is essentially post-modern. Pynchon's evocation of the weird tracklessness of post-war California, with its octopus-like defense contractors (Yoyodyne) and grotesque real estate developments (San Narciso) and comfortably hopeless alienation (Mucho; Oedpia), is simply inspired. Terrain of that sort makes refugees of everyone, necessitating and justifying the book's fixation on banality, identity, paranoia, conspiracy, and loss. That Pynchon chooses to explain Maxwell's Demon and thereby highlight concepts of entropy is a trade-mark flourish, dense and scientific and wholly pertinent to the novel's theme, mirrored in Gravity's Rainbow with Pavlov and causality. What does anything mean after the war, after the obliteration of all the old orders? At the novel's beginning, Oedipa and Mucho are wholly lost--each having affairs, he with nymphets; each psycho-analyzed but discontented; Oedipa bored at home and Mucho oppressed at work; Oedipa has sacrificed her last possible escape by breaking with Inverarity and is wondering at expiration date of her physical and sexual attractiveness. Hilarious, a hiding Nazi who claims to have driven a patient mad with a face, looms large as California's answer to the Maas's doldrums, a pusher of science and drugs. Oedipa's adventure as executrix of the will is a reaction to all of this stale hopelessness, even if it is taken as wholly delusional. She'll seek meaning, any meaning, over the one that prevailed at the novel's beginning. Mucho, of course, doesn't; he simply gets hooked on acid and becomes a sated non-entity.

The book's cultural awareness is astounding. You get all the good references that you expect from a post-modern novel--winks at the Beatles, at the war, at politics, at the drug culture, at Nabokov, at Bartok, at Lockheed, at Greene, at John Webster and John Ford. Does anyone read Webster anymore? I certainly never had, and in the days before Wikipedia had to look into what a "Jacobean revenge tragedy" might be. The incorporation of the "Courier's Tragedy" into the narrative is technically exquisite, using inherent creepiness, the promise of revelation, and a threatening prescience to sharpen the paranoid edge of the novel into a razor.

Speaking of "The Courier's Tragedy" and paranoia, one of the book's many virtues is its ability to generate a real sense of mystery and dread in the reader. Contrary to you, Sebastian, I did not find the book predictable. Having read it a number of times, I still find myself shivering when the Tristero's assassins fall on the courier in the play, when Oedipa wanders the city at night looking for muted horns and signs, when she finds her new acquaintances disappearing one by one through the gruesome logic of the tragedy, and most of all when she arrives at the auction house for the crying of lot 49. Each reading leads to a reevaluation of what's happened--is there a conspiracy, was Inverarity playing a joke, is Oedipa hallucinating or deluding herself? Pynchon admirably refuses to tilt his hand and closes the novel with one of the best endings I've ever read. I credit the multiplicity of possible readings, the tautness of the mystery, and the many-layered provocativeness of the ideas (e.g., Maxwell's Demon; entropy; certainty/uncertainty; or post-war ennui; military/suburban rigidity/sickness (Hilarious); paranoia as a real of invented explanation/raison d'etre/effect; Tristero and conspiracies) to Pynchon's acumen. Only a labyrinthine and strange and wonderful mind could concoct such a story and place such ideas into it.

I wrote "many-layered provocativeness" in the last paragraph, which doesn't really mean what I want it to mean. What I want it to mean is that all of the aspects of the book that I've discussed or are familiar must be dumped into a common pot and stewed if the book's to be savored properly. It's Pynchon's ability to be hilarious and arcane and perspicacious and sympathetic all at once that is excellent. His language alone is beautiful. When he manages to wed it to a coherent or semi-coherent idea, as he does in The Crying of Lot 49, then it's astounding. A book of conspiracies lends itself to inter-weaving, of course, but anyone who's ready anything about conspiracies knows that most of their chroniclers are ham-fisted small-minded idiots. Most fiction writers who try their hands at conspiracy stories also fail. But Pynchon's book isn't simply a conspiracy story. Rather, he uses conspiracy and paranoia incisively to explore interesting questions about identity, awareness, place, and knowledge. The book is your East Coast debutante or my grad student talking in a funny impassioned way about despair and how she's afraid that it will creep up on her in the night.

Apologize for the disjointed and long remarks. I do love the book, though, and felt some response warranted.

Yrs.,
Jack

White Noise: An Exchange. Part II

Here's part two of my discussion with John about DeLillo's novel White Noise. Part one can be found here. Enjoy!

* * * * * *


Tim,

I want to make a very brief comment at the top here to address a potential criticism. I understand what bad practice it is to critique a novel having admitted to reading only the first 30 pages of it, so in the time since our last exchange, I've finished the book. I'm glad I did, not least because I think I found a few things that I can usefully contrast to DeLillo's Underworld, a novel I liked a great deal, despite its flaws. But more on that next time.

You say you're getting ahead of yourself when you write about the mostly ominous tones on DeLillo's palette. (To quote you: "In the midst of banality lie great dangers. But we humans are blind! We don't pay attention! We're distracted by all our objects, by the machines and products which fill our empty days!") Luckily, this is a conversation, and you're not getting ahead of me. In fact, you're reading my mind. The first thing I wanted to mention in my second salvo is this passage, while the family is gathered in the kitchen:

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence.

This is ridiculous for several reasons, some of which even contradict each other. I'll label them until I get bored or run out of letters: A) First and foremost, it makes an obvious point in the (non-)guise of a bad image. It's even followed by a section break, meaning its profundity is expected to not only register, but to linger. Instead, this pause only serves to emphasize the ridiculousness. B) It's not practically meaningful. Smoke alarms go off all the time without fires around. Especially in the afternoon, with everyone awake and aware, they shouldn't be panicked about it. It's like saying people should react to every blaring car alarm as if a vehicle is being hotwired. C) Speaking of practicality, forget about checking for fire; not one member of the family goes up to just rip the damn thing off the ceiling to stop the noise? Really? They finish their lunch in silence? (Of course, it wouldn't even be silence, with the soundtrack of the alarm.)

See, it's hard to start unpacking moments like that one, because it's like addressing suitcases fresh off a month's vacation overseas -- you could waste the better part of a day doing it. What's important is that, as a reader, you register all those complaints internally and instantaneously. This makes for a bumpy and frustrating ride.

But at least the smoke-alarm variety of menace attaches itself to an actual object. At least as often, the sense of something momentous is left not vaguely defined but undefined:

Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content.

That's pretty general, all right. It's what Myers referred to as "the safe, catchall vagueness of astrologists and palm readers," though I'd say even that description is generous.

Since you brought up Myers, I went back and looked at that essay, which I read when it was published in summer 2001. And now I'm feeling a bit bad that we're having this conversation, since he pointed out many of the same things, though we've yet to truly lapse into plagiarism. (Myers is back at it in this month's Atlantic, putting his full nelson on Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. I haven't read Smoke, but I thought Johnson's Angels and Jesus' Son were both terrific -- particularly the former. I don't know -- at his best, I think Myers is a needed corrective to a culture of book reviewing that increasingly doesn't discuss books on the level of their prose. But at his worst, I think he's someone who magnifies a sentence or two from a 700-page novel in order to make points that may be too fine. On balance, I think he's a less histrionic version of Dale Peck, and I do think there's room for someone like that.)

(By the way, apropos of nothing, my spell-check inquired about not one, not two, but 22 of the words in the Rabelais passage you included last time. Spell-check needs to brush up on its 16th century something fierce.)

OK, I'll leave a couple of other brief points for my next (last?) missive. Feel free to broaden the scope of this discussion, now that Myers has been introduced. Or not. Blog free or die.

Best,
John

****

John,

I love this; your points are both funny and true. Why doesn't anybody turn off the fire alarm? I'd never thought of that! I want to linger on this passage, actually, because it provides me a convenient entry to discuss what I believe to be the book's central problem. And that problem is this: it has a thesis. (Roughly: the endless, inescapable presence of data in American life alienates us both from each other and from ourselves. The result is that we inhabit an empty and sterile world, in which our only relief from fear and suffering is unthinking consumption.)

Many people (like Joshua Ferris, on whom more in my next post) seem to think this thesis constitutes a powerful insight into American culture, and of course those are the people who most admire the book. I think a very interesting discussion could be had on the thesis itself. (Perhaps you could address that in your response?) However, I'd like to make another argument, which is that a work of fiction should not have a thesis.

I'm not saying novels should not contain ideas. I'm saying they should contain many ideas. Because, if it aims to show the world as it is -- to represent reality -- art must make an effort to show that the world is a multifaceted, and often contradictory place, certainly not one that can be reduced to some simple ideology. I think you could make a strong argument, in fact, that the very purpose of art is to provide structure in which these sorts of competing and contradictory ideas can coexist. (And in so doing, offer some kind possible hope for existing in a pluralistic democratic society.)

I think that the effect of a thesis on the reader and the writer is to create a book like White Noise -- one in which every single human interaction exists in part to prove the book's central idea. So, to return to your fire alarm scene, the reason his characters don't turn off the fire alarm is not because that's the kind of people they are, or because they have some psychological or exterior reason not to -- it's because Don DeLillo doesn't want them to, because he's trying to make a point. And that justifies 90% of what happens in the novel. No one in White Noise speaks as a person in the world would speak or acts as a person in the world would act. I understand that novels aren't reality and that artists have to distort things for effect, but while reading White Noise with any degree of attention, you constantly say to yourself: This is totally wrong. This wouldn't happen. This is not the way the world is. People don't talk like this. Etc. etc. To which I think DeLillo would say: but I'm trying to prove a point. To which I would say: but the fact that your point forces you to distort reality so gravely only proves how empty it is.

I looked for scenes where this distortion occurs, but it was hard to choose. There's one on almost every page. People think in lists, or in vapid and portentous banalities (the passage you quote about the "sorrowful weight" of possession is a perfect illustration). They don't speak, they lecture, and their argument is always part and parcel of the theme:

"This is the new austerity," he said. "Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort."

Or:

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies?"

Or:

"What is there?" "Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down after they come shooting off the surface of giant stars."
"If there's no hot or cold, how can molecules cool down?"
"Hot and cold are words. Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can't just grunt."
"It's called the sun's corolla," Denise said to Steffie in a separate discussion. "We saw it the other night on the weather network."
"I thought Corolla was a car," Steffie said.
"Everything's a car," Heinrich said.

It's one reason I don't think you really needed to read past page 30; the book is just the same idea over and over and over again. There are no additional pleasures; the language is workmanlike, the characters are flat, the dialogue is preposterous. As Myers notes, many people say it's a very funny book, but almost none of them ever actually bother to point to what in it makes them laugh.

I want to briefly describe why White Noise, more than almost any other book of the last twenty years, excites such an intense response in me, but I'm going to wait for a later email. Hopefully I'll also have mustered up some thoughts about B.R. Myers, a critic I very much admire. In the meantime, I'm curious what you have to say about this idea of art that has a thesis. Can you think of any successful art that's animated first and foremost by a single all-encompassing idea? And what do you think of White Noise's thesis? Is it true? Is it powerful?

Best,
Tim

White Noise: An Exchange. Part I

My friend John and I are having a discussion about Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. Here are the first two emails.

John writes:

You know that I've only managed to make it through the first 30 pages
of White Noise, twice. Underworld is one of my favorite novels despite
its flaws, but for some reason the flaws seem much more glaring to me
in this novel, and yet I think it's generally held in higher regard. I
wanted to start by talking about his view of suburbia and consumerism.
On the very first page, the narrator itemizes the loot from a recent
shopping expedition:

"....the junk food still in shopping bags--onion-and-garlic chips,
nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints."

I think some people must find this funny, or insightful, or both. It
just seems silly to me. Maybe in the mid-80s, when the book was
written, just casting one's eye over a panoply of pop-cultural (or in
this case, pop-culinary) items stood as some kind of larger spiritual
commentary. Or is it just DeLillo who thinks noticing those things is
deep in and of itself? He resorts to gimmicks like this often early in
the book, which is one reason I can't bring myself to delve further.
Am I right, or does he back off a little bit as he goes?

Of course, when he tries to connect images like the one above to more
explicit commentary, I get even more agitated. A few pages later, he
goes back to the groceries for inspiration:

"It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls -- it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening."

It's clear that DeLillo is satirizing those who have a "snug home" in
their souls that is satisfied by food purchases. But whenever I read
something like the paragraph above, two thoughts occur: 1. Who are
these people who stake their existential happiness on family bargain
packs? Isn't DeLillo just creating them in order to destroy them? That
seems boring. I feel like people in the 'burbs with the giant,
gleaming grocery stores enter and leave them feeling like anyone else
would: depending on their mood. I frequently shopped at such places in
Texas. Sometimes it was thrilling -- on a good day, or some night at 2
a.m. when I was feeling wistful -- and other times it was deadening
and seemed like too much. DeLillo's stance, that it somehow inherently
reflects a larger soullessness, strikes me as a teenage feeling. 2. Is
it wrong to feel some kind of satisfaction from living a life that
allows you to have what you want/need? Where does DeLillo draw that
line? Put another way, how many groceries are you allowed to be happy
about before you become ridiculous?

jw



John,

So much to say!

The problem I’ve had in responding to your letter is that I agree so completely with everything you’ve said, I don’t know what to add.

On the subject of the supermarket: yes. DeLillo returns here (the supermarket) again and again throughout the book. It’s worth your time to compare the paragraph you cite to the book’s final paragraph, in which the narrator again revisits the supermarket. It would be a useful way for us to consider the book’s overall thematic development (such as it is).

On the subject of lists: yes. There must have been a time—maybe in the 70s—when providing long lists seemed an exciting literary technique. The master of this, in my reading, is Donald Barthelme. He stole the technique from Rabelais (among others) who frequently uses it as a way of undercutting (by overdoing) the gravity of a situation. Here’s Rabelais on the preparation for a siege:

Some from the fields brought into the fortified places their movables, bestial, corn, wine, fruit, victuals, and other necessary provision. Others did fortify and rampire their walls, set up little fortresses, bastions, squared ravelins, digged trenches, cleansed countermines, fenced themselves with gabions, contrived platforms, emptied casemates, barricaded the false brays, erected the cavaliers, repaired the counterscarps, plastered the curtains, lengthened ravelins, stopped parapets, morticed barbicans, assured the portcullises, fastened the herses, sarasinesques, and cataracts, placed their sentries, and doubled their patrol. Everyone did watch and ward, and not one was exempted from carrying the basket. Some polished corselets, varnished backs and breasts, cleaned the headpieces, mail-coats, brigandines, salads, helmets, morions, jacks, gushets, gorgets, hoguines, brassars, and cuissars, corselets, haubergeons, shields, bucklers, targets, greaves, gauntlets, and spurs. Others made ready bows, slings, crossbows, pellets, catapults, migrains or fire-balls, firebrands, balisets, scorpions, and other such warlike engines expugnatory and destructive to the Hellepolides.

This is totally irrelevant to White Noise. But I love Rabelais.

At some point, the newness faded—and that point was long ago. Now the technique has to be judged on its merits which I think, generally, are few. Lists make for uninteresting writing. The heart of any sentence—the engine—is the verb. Take that away, and you get flat, listless (no pun intended) sentences. They smack of laziness: they require the writer only passively record what he sees or imagines, and to dispense with subordination, logical reasoning, and ordering in time—the tools and exigencies of thought. White Noise is stuffed with lists (along with their ugly older brother, fragments). They reflect, I suggest, the essential intellectual laziness that characterizes most of the novel.

* * *

For me, it’s useful to consider the ways a book (as distinct from a poem, or a movie) can provide its reader pleasure. (Because pleasure, in the end, is what counts). If that seems to slight the role of art (shouldn’t they do more than just give us pleasure?) realize that I consider being taught, or made to feel, or—ideally—made to feel and think simultaneously—varieties of pleasure. Pleasure at its most rarefied, and noble.

In order to save something for the next letter, I’m only going to talk here about two ways of the numerous ways a novel can provide pleasure.

1) Humor, Laughter, Wit.

Many great writers are funny (perhaps all? Humorlessness a trait of all mediocre artists?). Some, I would submit, are great ONLY because they’re funny. The works of P.G. Wodehouse, for example, offer no great psychological penetration into the human soul. They don’t force us to examine our world, or to delve more deeply into its hidden mysteries. But they’re funny—sometimes very funny—and that’s enough.

Many who admire White Noise seem to think it’s funny (my edition features a glowing blurb from the New Republic that cites its devastating wit). I’ve read it three times, and at no point in any of those readings did I so much as crack a smile. Of course I can’t prove that it’s not funny—a negative can never be proven. But I would invite anyone who disagrees to provide examples of passage they find funny.

One of my favorite critical essay of the last few years was R.B Meyer’s, “A Reader’s Manifesto.” In it, he has this to say about DeLillo’s sense of humor:

Throughout DeLillo's career critics have called his work funny: "absurdly comic ... laugh-out-loud funny" (Michiko Kakutani), "grimly funny" (Phillips). And most seem to agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that White Noise is "one of Don DeLillo's funniest." At the same time, they refuse to furnish examples of what they find so amusing. I have a notion it's things like "Are the men in hacking jackets? What's a hacking jacket?" but it would be unfair to assert this without evidence. Luckily for our purposes, Mark Osteen, in an introduction to a recent edition of the novel, singles out the following conversation as one of the best bits of "sparkling dialogue" in this "very funny" book. It is telling that the same cultural elite that never quite "got" the British comic novel should split its sides at this.

"I will read," she said. "But I don't want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these people do as long as they don't enter or get entered."

"Agreed."
"'I entered her and began to thrust.'"
"I'm in total agreement," I said.
"'Enter me, enter me, yes, yes.'"
"Silly usage, absolutely."
"'Insert yourself, Rex. I want you inside me, entering hard ...'"

And so on. Osteen would probably have groaned at that exchange if it had turned up on Sex and the City. The fuss he makes over it in this context is a good example of how pathetically grateful readers can be when they discover—lo and behold!—that a "literary" author is actually trying to entertain them for a change.

2) Linguistic/Stylistic Beauty.

By “beauty” I don’t mean “complexity.” Updike and Nabokov are both fantastic prose stylists. So—in his quiet way—is Graham Greene. So is Denis Johnson. So is Raymond Carver. DeLillo, in my reading, is not. His prose isn’t awful; it’s not embarrassing. But neither is it special. Here’s a selection, chosen completely at random (it’s at the start of Chapter 21, page 107 in the Penguin Great Books edition):

After a night of dream-lit snows the air turned clear and still. There was a taut blue quality in the January light, a hardness and confidence. The sound of boots on packed snow, the contrails streaked cleanly in the high sky. Weather was very much the point, although I didn’t know it at first.

What can we say about this? There is a taut blue quality in (not “to”) the January light. Ok. I don’t think that’s a meaningful change. I think it’s supposed to be profound and ominous; I find it a little self-conscious. The third sentence (“The sound of boots...”) is a fragment, a favorite DeLillo technique. I think it works fine here; this is probably my favorite sentence in the paragraph. Stylistically, there’s nothing much here to praise or censure.

By the way, the paragraph’s ominous conclusion (“although I didn’t know it at first”) perfectly captures the book’s mood. In the midst of banality lie great dangers. But we humans are blind! We don’t pay attention! We’re distracted by all our objects, by the machines and products which fill our empty days!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s not much relevant to a discussion of White Noise, but I want to include a selection from Couples, Updike’s semi-notorious chronicle of infidelity among the leisured elite. It’s a novel whose characters repelled me and whose story didn’t really interest me. But I could not put it down, because of writing like this:

Piet was by profession a builder, in love with snug, right-angled things, and he had grown to love this house, its rectangular low rooms, its baseboards and chair rails molded and beaded by hand, the slender mullions of the windows whose older panes were flecked with oblong bubbles and tinged with lavender, the swept worn brick of the fireplace hearths like entryways into a sooty upward core of time, the attic he had lined with silver insulation paper so it seemed now a vaulted jewel box or an Aladdin’s cave, the solid freshly poured basement that had been a cellar floored with dirt when they had moved in five years ago.

I can ignore and forgive any issues I have with Updike because the prose affords me so much pleasure. White Noise does not.

The Porcupine-Lay

I first learned about Patrick O'Brian through David Mamet, of all people. He claimed--I think it was in an interview--that the best novelists then writing (this was 15 years ago) weren't the so-called "literary" ones (Auster, DeLillo, Roth, etc): they were genre writers. As examples he listed John LeCarre and Patrick O'Brian. I read LeCarre almost immediately. (He's excellent, by the way). O'Brian, for some reason, I put off. Maybe I wasn't ready for twenty straight 300-page novels. I think I knew that once I started, I wouldn't stop. It was a big commitment.

Five years ago, I finally picked up Master and Commander, the first book in the series. I read it, then I read the series. A year later, I read the series again. In the process, I bought eight of the novels. Perhaps unfortunately, they now reside six inches from my reading chair. The result is that I reread them over and over--generally to the neglect of whatever book (usually 'literary') I'm supposed to be reading. At this point, I've probably read each of them at least ten times. I know them better than anything else in my shelves.

I don't have the time or ability to attempt a full-length appreciation of O'Brian. Briefly: he is amazing, and I would encourage you all to read him. As far as it's possible to know what it would be like to live in a different era, O'Brian, I think, knew. (By which I mean: imagined.) To read him is to have, at least in flashes, hints of that same knowledge. He's a writer of phenomenal intellect and great wisdom, of course; but more than that, he is a writer, like Shakespeare, able to depict fully-realized portraits of society on every level. Dukes and princes, admirals and captains, sailors and whores: they're all there. None of them are sentimentalized, and all of them are somehow real.

Big claims, I know, and ones that I can't illustrate in a single passage. Here, though, is one of my (current) favorites. The ship is about to leave port. "Jack" is Jack Aubrey, the captain and one of the book's heroes. The other character, Heaven, is insignificant to the plot:

...and now they had been together long enough, with a good deal of foul weather and some very hard fighting, to have formed a distinct community with a great sense of their ship and a great pride in her.

A somewhat anomalous community however in a ship that looked so very like a man-of-war, for not only did it contain no Marines, no uniformed officers and no midshipmen, but people walked about at ease, even with their hands in their pockets; there was a certain amount of laughter in the forecastle in spite of the parting; and the quartermaster at the con, wiping a tear from his cheek and shaking his grey head, did not scruple to address Jack directly: "I shall never see her like again, sir. The loveliest young woman in Shelmerston."

"A lovely young woman indeed, Heaven," said Jack. "Mrs. Heaven, if I do not mistake?"

"Why, sir, in a manner of speaking: but some might say more on the porcupine-lay, the roving-line, if you understand me."

"There is a good deal to be said for porcupines, Heaven: Solomon had a thousand, and Solomon knew what o'clock it was, I believe. You will certainly see her again."