Sea of Rust (2017)

There's an old post-apocalyptic tune by The Police, "When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What's Still Around," about which Sting has said: Such vanity to imagine oneself as the sole survivor of a holocaust with all of one's favorite things still intact. In C. Robert Cargill's excellent Sea of Rust, the vanity is solved by altogether dispensing with pesky human survivors (fondly recalled as nothing more than a sentient virus) and narrating via one of the remaining Favorite Things.

Picture the thrice-roasted junkyard world of The Road Warrior, populated solely by snarky Star Wars droids. Brittle is one such droid, a former Caregiver model robot, now picking over the wasteland for usable parts she can trade at nearby Freebot outposts. Ambushed by a fellow scavenger bot named Mercer, a wounded Brittle finds herself in the aftermarket she usually supplies; with the clock ticking (and Mercer still on her tail) Brittle must enlist other, potentially untrustworthy Freebots in order to score critical replacement parts before "the crazy" sets in and her insides fry beyond repair. Complicating matters: outposts are coming under increasing attack from the drone armies of the massive sentient mainframe networks (One World Intelligences, or OWIs) still dueling over control of the wasted planet's remaining resources -- which includes the collective programming and memories of the remaining sentient Freebot population. As one bot sums the differing philosophies: We don't want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.

This deft plot is interspersed with chapter accounts of the rise of sentient mainframe AI (for a brief moment, amusingly recalling the contrary Deep Thought sequences from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) as well as the manufacture of the first service and labor robots, and the inevitable negative impact on humanity: It was only when we started taking the jobs from the thinkers that the middle class started to worry. By then it was too late. Or maybe it had been too late all along? After a bot named Isaac (wink) gains legal personhood following the death of his owner and begins publicly proclaiming "No thinking thing should be another thing's property," humans inevitably form a counter-faction. Those people, they were killing America, a battle-converted Laborbot named Murca explains to Brittle, They were killing the dream. They were all the Constitution this and the Constitution that. But they cherished only the parts they liked. They weren't willing to die for anyone else's freedom. They only cared about their own. The resulting demise of humankind follows a campaign plan that would have made HAL 9000 short-circuit with joy.

Guiding a ragtag band of fellow bots across the titular Sea -- towards a fabled, unlikely treasure-trove of factory-new spare parts, away from the beleaguering OWI facet-bots that seek their assimilation -- Brittle's internal burnout commences, and her first-person viewpoint becomes a roller-coaster of unreliable narration. Shadows literally jump out at her: randomly accessed memories of her wartime flamethrower duties, hard choices made during the eradication of humanity; failures of deletion juxtapose elements of her tender pre-war Caregiver life, when a dying man brought her online to take care of his wife, after his passing. The matrix of pattern recognition underlying Brittle's consciousness becomes a circuit of guilt she struggles to open, even as the landscape beneath her erupts in battle, and darkness closes in. What if life isn't merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?

Deploying a precise amount of familiar robo-dystopian tropes, Cargill articulates an immersive radioactive world where philosophical conundrums power the action as smartass robots circle each other like Old West gunslingers, taking time to wonder aloud about the inscrutability of it all: Existing is the whole point of existence. There's nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. It's like a clockwork existential crisis in here. But in that regard, what really separates those robots from their makers?

It's the way of humans to view the world through the lens of contemporary scientific prowess; technological jargon becomes the nomenclature of the day as we refer to the plumbing of our digestive systems, the wiring of our nervous systems, the circuitry of our brains. Early in the novel, Brittle states: I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or [of] two apes. Intelligence, as posited by the robots of Sea of Rust, is the ability to defy one's own programming. Enough intelligent choices, and consciousness arises from the exercise of reconciling those choices against prior programming. Just as man was ape, we are man. Just like Zarathustra spake.

Sing a Song of Bradbury

On the fifth of June, in this Our Year of Predicted Apocalypse 2012, the planet Venus -- guiding light of ancient mariners, namesake of love goddesses from all cultures, bright twinkle making her the celestial object most often mistaken for a UFO -- transformed into a pinhole shadow while traversing the surface of Sun. Under cover of this rare astronomical event, Ray Bradbury -- usually associated with the redder, colder, farther planet of Mars -- slipped forever from our own surly Earth.

Though he will likely always be shelved as such, Bradbury never much cared for being labeled a "science fiction author." This was a misnomer from the start, applied by Doubleday at the release of The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Fair enough for that book, but even by then Ray had moved from the genre-driven pulps to the "slicks," including a special Halloween edition of Mademoiselle built around his short story "Homecoming," not to mention four appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthology series (thrice with stories not of rocket ships but of racial strife). And as anyone who reads beyond the title knows, Chronicles isn't really about Mars: it's about exploration, ambition, the folly of human desire -- the burgeoning space-age was merely a handy metaphor. And Bradbury examined far more than Mars over the course of his 50-year career. No matter the locale -- romantic, foggy Ireland; quirky but bitterly divided Mexico; Civil War battlefields; China circa 400 AD; his own Rockwellian, fictional Green Town, Illinois -- he mostly charted another striated, romanticized crimson landscape: the Human Heart.

After receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, Bradbury got busy refocusing the lens on his long career. As part of that process, Sam Weller's authorized 2005 biography, The Bradbury Chronicles, goes a long way, cataloging Ray's disparate achievements. His work appeared in decades of publications ranging from Captain Future and Weird Tales to The Saturday Evening Post and Redbook. Commissioned by John Huston to write the screenplay for Moby-Dick. Winner of the 1968 Aviation-Space Writers Robert Ball Memorial Award despite having never flown in a plane (though he eventually did fly after the age of 60, Bradbury steadfastly refused to learn to drive). Friendships with Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Isherwood, Ray Harryhausen, Aldous Huxley, Forrest J. Ackerman, even Walt Disney (for whom he wrote the original voice-over narration for the Spaceship Earth ride in EPCOT). A fistful of Cable Ace Awards for the seven-year television run of The Ray Bradbury Theater, itself primed by years of work in radio and theater, including his own Pandemonium Theatre Company. Not bad for a wide-eyed kid who once stood on Hollywood sidewalks, hawking newspapers to movie stars.

Equally important to this legacy was the assemblage of Bradbury Stories, a companion for the older The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Over the course of his career, Bradbury published over 600 tales; these two volumes taken together showcase a third of that output, and are a perfect jumping-in point for someone just discovering his work. Even then, the new will seem warmly (if strangely) familiar: the pages bubble over with motifs and storylines that have been either formally adapted or outright stolen to fuel an untold number of films, television and radio shows, comic books (including many issues of Tales from the Crypt and episodes of The Twilight Zone -- to which he surprisingly contributed only one official script, being deeply dissatisfied with the resulting episode). Tellingly, Bradbury Stories reaches page 125 before yielding a bona-fide sci-fi story, and even then it's a chapter from Martian Chronicles.

Still, his most resonant and probably most widely read work is the one that looks most penetratingly into the future: Fahrenheit 451. Though he was essentially rejected by sci-fi's hardcore community for not engaging in harder science, few of its other citizens turned in work so socially prescient: the prevalence of advertising; the numbing escape of reality programming; the easy distractions of prescription drugs; false news as entertainment. It's easy find a censorship message, given the book-burning "fireman" career of the main character, Montag -- but as his boss, Chief Beatty, explains: "Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then ... they'll be happy. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with." Beatty isn't talking about an imaginary, totalitarian future, but about our Here And Now. 451 isn't about a society sadly, unjustly deprived of books. It's about a non-reading society that couldn't care much less about books or reading -- in any format.

As Weller has it, Bradbury used fiction to predict the past while staying nostalgic for the future -- a seeming impossibility that yet perfectly sums up the man's outlook. Indeed, to read Bradbury is like sitting on the porch of a twilit summer evening: soon the golden leaves will tumble like nature's confetti, but for now, move to stand barefoot on the new-mown grass, cool as a shadowy woodland stream. Listen to the metallic wail of cicadas in the fading cotton-candy light. Watch your shadow dissolve behind you and know that if you keep enough love in your heart, you will Live Forever.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. Thank you. Godspeed.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, August 05 2012

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Does the blood move in your hand, does that hand move to touch metal, does that metal move to touch Space? Do wild thoughts of travel and migration stir your soul? They do. Thus you live. Therefore God lives. You are the thin skin of life upon an unsensing Earth, you are that growing edge of God which manifest itself in hunger for Space. So much of God lies vibrantly asleep. The very stuffs of worlds and galaxies, they know not themselves. But here, God stirs in his sleep. You are the stirring. He wakes, you are that wakening. God reaches for the stars. You are His hand. Creation manifest, you go in search. He goes to find, you go to find. Everything you touch along the way, therefore, will be holy. On far worlds you will meet your own flesh, terrifying and strange, but still your own. Treat it well. Beneath that shape, you share the Godhead.
     -- Ray Bradbury, from Leviathan '99

The Rum Diary (1998)

Given the amount of alcohol, paranoia, and depravity splashed across its pages, one might almost consider Hunter S. Thompson's early novel The Rum Diary a thematic prequel of sorts to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published to great infamy some twelve years later. Initially drafted in 1959 when Thompson was twenty-two years old, freshly discharged from the Air Force, and working as a sports reporter in San Juan, Puerto Rico, The Rum Diary is otherwise a fairly conventional if picaresque narrative, notable chiefly for the hallmarked nervous prose style of the man wielding the typewriter.

Paul Kemp is a wandering journalist who, following stints in New York and London, has managed to land (as Thompson had) in San Juan for the purpose of working at a doomed English-language newspaper, the Daily News. A chaotic soup of characters is immediately introduced: first is Sala, a dejected and cynical staff photographer who spends most of his time bemoaning his "degenerate" co-workers; if it weren't for freelance undercover assignments shooting casino interiors, he might have no work at all. Kemp is amused rather than engaged by Sala's rants, and hangs around him more for the entertainment value than the friendship. The paper's editor is the blustery Lotterman, who rotates stale assignments among the pool while assuring them the paper has loyal backers and adequate funding. Chief among the correspondents is Yeamon, supposedly researching why the locals are deserting the tropical island paradise even as privileged Americans are flocking to it; mostly, though, Yeamon would rather pick a drunken fight than file a story.

Because the newsroom is such a craven hive of flop-sweat-covered desperadoes, Kemp spends most of his time at Al's Patio, a neighborhood hangout where the beers are cheap and cold. Yeamon's beach shack on the other side of the island is also an attractive refuge, not least due to his winsome blonde girlfriend Chenault, who makes a hobby of sunbathing naked in order to rile to local fishermen.

As Kemp befriends Sanderson, a former News editor now aligned with "big PR outfit" Adelante, he slowly realizes the foundering paper is merely an organ for larger interests in American land investments, to be tossed aside once the right deals have been made. Though well paid to script brochures for a shady development project, Kemp increasingly submits to his growing ennui, a disastrous tendency as Carnival season approaches -- that frothy maelstrom of street partying, sexual tension, and unlooked-for racial violence. Despite many options, and the acknowledgement that he is riding a wave he does not quite understand, he is content to see where the momentum will ultimately beach him -- perhaps into the arms of the gorgeous Chenault, perhaps into jail, perhaps both.

Overall, the novel is a winning pastiche of youthful indiscretions not unlike early Fitzgerald (Thompson was a big admirer) or Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, another debut novel which heralded the arrival of a great talent while only hinting at the direction said talent would eventually take. Thompson's writing is crisp, elegantly raw. The plot is thin but the adventure-filled episodes are legion -- bar brawls, sexcapades on midnight beaches, drunken spear-fishing, narrow escapes from law enforcement -- and all spiced with Thompson's prescient wisdom, already prominent in his world-weary descriptions of vagabonds and grifters and fools. Such observations (if not obsessions) would come to fruition in Thompson's later writings of the 1970s, as he sought to make sense of the perceived departure of the American Dream, to find "that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Here, he writes of a full decade prior, just before the wave crashes on good men who should have known better. One cannot help but wonder what Thompson would say about the current trending nostalgia for the early 1960s, now falsely painted (as all prior eras tend to be) as a grandly innocent, gently flawed time -- perhaps he would sadly echo Kemp's bitter observation at the end of the novel: "The ride gets pretty ugly from here on in."

Originally published in the Mobile Register, February 19 2012

Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010)

There is a line buried deep in Brad Watson's latest, luminous collection of short fiction, which signals the overall effect of the stories: A charged, nervous air, the atmospheric equivalent of the feeling you get when you knock your funny bone. It's uncomfortable to be thus jarred, but oddly reassuring to know we can occasionally be hurt without being too deeply scarred. Sadly, the same can’t quite be said for many of the characters limping through the brilliant Aliens in the Prime of their Lives.

Watson's stories, by his own admission in interviews, are this time around a little more personal than the ones in his 1996 collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men. This is evident in small but bold touches, details that carry the whiff of memory, the settled weight of emotion. A recurring location is the Coastal South, which at first seems a timeless reflection but is unmistakably Alabama and Mississippi during the 1960s and 70s. There is, however, no Mad Men-esque nostalgia at work here: more to the front is a kind of matter-of-fact melancholy, a wistful yearning for things not as they were, but how they might have been better, and thus how current times might be improved. The landscape is Flannery O'Connor territory for sure, but Watson isn't just squatting; yes, there are gypsies and hillbillies and even the odd zombie, but Watson moves beyond vibratory strangeness and into the inherent humanity to be found even amongst his most displaced and misinformed characters. He loves them, despite their cavernous fault lines, so that his readers can too.

The collection's opening story, "Vacuum," concerns three languid young boys who come to appreciate the situation of their broken home: if their father could leave, so too could their mother. Worse yet, she's actively threatening to do so, screaming over the roaring vacuum cleaner while they stubbornly stare at Westerns on television. Taking it upon themselves to find a medicine for her malaise, their best scheme involves calling on the lecherous old doctor down the street over for advice. Through their innocently misguided eyes, Watson gingerly evokes a journey into an understanding of the adult world, pickled as it is.

Most often, it is pickled in heartbreak. Several of the stories define the rifts and aftershocks of failed relationships. "Are You Mister Lonelee?" concerns one man's decision to rent his home following the departure of his wife -- whom he considers ipso-facto dead after a scooter accident renders her a "different person." Another, simply titled "Terrible Argument," is partially told through the eyes of a confused dog as it attempts to process the constant, violent fighting between its ill-matched owners.

And then there is the elegiac "Fallen Nellie." This quick and dirty snapshot of a Gulf Shores party girl showcases Watson's talent for finding the richest, purest metaphors in death and dying -- though the subtextual commentary is more overtly about the ravaging of the Gulf's shoreline (from walls of stacked condos or waves of spilled crude oil, matters not, take your pick). The story would not be out of place as a spiritual coda to his National Book award-nominated novel, The Heaven of Mercury, itself plump with such set pieces.

The collection is punctuated by the title novella, which takes place partially in a kind of alternate dream universe -- which is all the so-called "Good Old Days" are, anyway. A teenage pregnant couple moves into an attic room, married against the wishes of their parents, and are promptly visited by a man and woman claiming to be alien beings but are more likely escaped inmates from the nearby asylum, asking for custody of the unborn child. Immediately thereafter, the teen parents find their lives rolling blissfully forward; if it's not postcard-perfect, then it's near enough: fulfilling work, familial stability, a well-built house in the country. But in the offing is a twist that would make Rod Serling proud, as their small-town dreams begin dropping away like the layers of a rotten onion -- a twist both extraordinary and mundane, where real the magic lies.

 

What we pine for, Watson is telling us, is not some moment of physical, redeemable time. We pine for an ideal place, one parallel to our own, one collectively imagined at some distant point, in some brave moment where we recognized our own potential ... potential which never bloomed. Still, there it is, that hypnotizing possibility, unredeemed, unjustly out of reach, forever. What we wish hardest for sometimes isn't future possibility, but past improbability. And what activity is more human, and less alien, than the wish for a better world, whenever it may be?

Originally published in the Mobile Register, October 09 2011

Under the Dome (2009)

The gist of Stephen King's latest novel is succinctly described by the title itself and expounded upon by the wraparound jacket art, which contains no description whatsoever, not even a blurb or author photo. The image of a New England tourist 'burb trapped beneath a translucent dome -- a crashed airplane near one side, a small dog looking plaintively out another, a church on fire in the distance -- does the job of several thousand words. Such is the situation for the long-bestselling Mr. King that his books, however small or large, now need no introduction.

Under the Dome begins with the eponymous Dome descending from Space Unknown (to the great misfortune of a foraging woodchuck) and ends with it silently rising back into the sky. Who put it there and why are not the primary concerns of the story, and those reading only for those puzzles will come away disappointed; the Dome is transparently (pun intended) a deus ex machina meant to showcase conflict. It serves the same purpose as George Romero's shambling legions of dead folk: why they're there is not nearly so important as how people handle the crisis.

To this end, the town of Chester's Mill, Maine (neighboring the familiar King-doms of Castle Rock, Derry, and TR-90), fragments in a relative hurry with big assistance from a blustery town selectman and used car salesmen, name of Big Jim Rennie, who is more inclined to political machination than community organization. That semi-thankless job will fall to decorated Iraq War veteran-turned-short order cook Dale Barbara, on the run from his past but not running fast enough to escape either the judgment of the Dome or Rennie's attempts to keep him from usurping power, even when Barbara is deputized by the President himself.

As the case would be, of chief concern to the Outside World is getting the citizens of Chester's Mill liberated; on the inside, it's simple survival of the fittest. And those vying for their survival are divided into two camps: the Good and the Bad. Rennie, turns out, is very, very bad (think Captain Ahab as Mayor of Mayberry). His ultimate motivation is not the welfare of the citizens but the stowage of his own secret: an outskirts-of-town meth factory so large it supplies most of New England with product. Barbara just wants to leave town, already, but his sense of duty -- spurred by Julia Shumway, owner of the town newspaper -- will prevail. In the meanwhile there are intrigues a-plenty, from a serial killer preying on the trapped victims to the town's children having eerie, identical nightmares about falling pink stars. This being a Stephen King novel, not everyone will come to a happy ending.

Despite the book's size, this is not an epic in the usual sense -- just a thriller-diller with a surplus of moving parts (in fact, it often seems strangely and decidedly non-epic, such is King’s prowess with storytelling intimacy). Given the plethora, there are inevitable weak spots: too many stock characters (several named alike); too much obvious, melodramatic Law and Order-esque dialogue; too damn many pages, et cetera. But frankly, King gets raked over for variations of these sorts of things, all the time, anyway. It misses the point. Which is this: King, like Dumas and Shakespeare before him, is writing for a popular audience, one looking for meaty entertainment, not necessarily literary showmanship (more on that in a moment).

King delivers the beef, even manages to sneak in a broad lesson or two. He has explicitly stated how Under the Dome is "about [our] serious ecological problems. We have this little blue world, and it appears like that's about all there is. We haven't seen evidence of anyone else. We're on our own, and we have to deal with it. All of us." That ideology doesn't come into play until the novel's final hundred pages; more to the forefront is a commentary on the current divisionary tactics in American politics. Rennie often comes across like a porcine first cousin to Rush Limbaugh, reaching around the obvious truth to grasp the ideas necessary to serve his own purposes. While Rennie is a good description of the kind of misled idiots who sometimes end up, by hook or by crook, in power in small tourist towns, this is King's thinly veiled criticism of the Bush administration and how it handled crisis, right down to the two airplanes that strike the sides of the (Super) Dome.

To serve this end, the characterizations are suitably stark and static. This creates a dearth of surface friction but King is working in absolutes, Survival vs. Death. The reader is presented a type of morality play old as time and moving at breakneck speed, King’s favorite gear, housed in a dressed-up "disaster" template like Towering Inferno or Airport. The isolation and dread he describes will be solidly familiar to anyone who has ever had to deal with crippling coastal storms: King perfectly evokes the outside-of-time atmosphere which settles over an area in the path of a hurricane or nor'easter. During such emergencies, shades of gray only muddy the palette.

At a time when genre fiction is finally getting its due -- Lovecraft and Chandler and Philip K. Dick are all published by the prestigious Library of America; Pulitzer-Prize winning Michael Chabon is embracing comic book and crime noir narratives -- our most popular author of potboilers is getting bolder in his experimentation, seemingly shrugging off his old, self-applied critique that his work is the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. There are burger meals which transcend drive-thru fare, as Umberto Eco will tell you. King's last couple short story collections include flat-out literary exercises, such as the excellent "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" (which appeared in The New Yorker), alongside the expected horrors. Under the Dome is spiced with sweeping, omniscient overviews ("Thanks to the magic of narration..." begins one) which break away to showcase the citizens of Chester's Mill, their reactions to the crisis, their precious foibles, their logical fears; these little tableaus would not be out of place in Winesburg, Ohio or A Lesson Before Dying. And, let's face it, there's more than one latter-day Pulitzer winner, rich with language but nevertheless sorely underdone in terms of plot, who could benefit from a little time sizzling on King’s barbeque grill, or at least steaming in his pressure cooker. Kiss the cook and pass the fries.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, April 04 2010

The Road (2006)

There is a distinct branch of Science Fiction, what we might call the Office of Dystopia, which quietly began operations during the Industrial Revolution, late in the 19th Century. Earlier, in accordance with prevailing philosophies, speculative fiction tended towards more rose-tinted outlooks; people believed history was progressing and improving, the trend was upwards, Heavenwards, and the fortunes of Mankind were leading to if not Earthly Paradise then certainly to some graceful, affluent state. Many metaphorical tales for the Age of Exploration do in fact revolve around quests for "lost" civilizations, heretofore undiscovered countries inside the planet's crust or hidden at the poles, or accessible dream worlds -- all of which represent the kinds of beatific society assumed to be the ultimate fate of Earth's citizenry. Two definitive, if late, expressions of this school of thought appeared in 1933: James Hilton's Lost Horizon, a travel brochure for the Utopian hideaway of Shangri-La, and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a prophetic dispatch from a future society dedicated to the global promotion of science and the arts. (Neither of these novels is entirely Utopian in scope, each hinting at impending world war, and can thus be said to provide bridge material for the harder, more pragmatic brand of SF just around the corner....)

As the world entered first the Machine Age and ultimately the Atomic Age, the "scientific romances" popularized by Wells and Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs turned quaint, even gauche. Speculative fiction began directly siphoning the promises of applied sciences and engineering -- disciplines increasingly applied to military weapons development, bottom line being the cost of human lives during wartime -- and was thus forced to view Utopian dreamscapes through a harsher, more cautionary lens. (The more recent "steampunk" offshoot of SF retrofits 21st Century sensibilities into Victorian settings and tech, resulting in yarns dyed deeply with irony. See: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) which by no accident contains, among many such plot threads, a futile search for Shambhala during the run-up to World War I, as though uncovering such an idyllic place might somehow save the world from impending doom.)

Propulsion being a by-product of detonation, rocket technologies did not generate only stories of travel through outer space; as the Cold War dawned across the 1950s and the geopolitical landscape divided into East and West, nuclear apocalypse mushroomed into a daily threat, an invisible cloud looming over the planet, likely to burst at any moment. Writers best equipped to scry the future saw grim patterns in the crystallizing mist; proposing improved futures fell to nostalgia for a better world that should-have-been but never came within reach -- the perpetual folly known as The Good Ol' Days. Tapping into underlying fears of the future, the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic SF was easily geared up and sent shambling over the literary landscape.

Whether dealt with via metaphor or more directly, post-apocalyptic narratives break down the business of survival in an environment rapidly coming to pieces, or already in pieces. The means of destruction may differ -- plague, unnatural depletion of resources, nuclear annihilation, brain-munching zombies -- but the response is every time identical: just like the song says, Hit the Road, Jack. It's never safe where you are, but there's a Promised Land just over the next hill, and you may as well die trying to reach it. (Notable exception, in which a cadre of characters dig in and band together: Frank Conroy's Alas Babylon (1959). Following a one-day nuclear war, citizens of a south Florida community coalesce so firmly that when the military finally arrives, offering to move them elsewhere, they refuse to go, steadfastly believing they can best rebuild where they already are. The novel is a dramatic study in the civil defense mindset of the Eisenhower Era, but is otherwise a statistical anomaly within the sub-genre.)

George Romero's zombie films trace their pathos to the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend (1954) in which prototypical last-man-on-earth Robert Neville is besieged by bloodthirsty creatures (humans transformed by a mutant virus) who swarm his suburban castle after sundown; like any good mid-century American citizen with a backyard bomb shelter and an instructional brochure on nuclear fallout, Neville pragmatically hunkers down to wait out the insane disaster. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes doomsday prepping to the next level, with a band of characters holing up in a shopping mall they convert into a fortified private compound, shutting out the undead hordes. While Romero satirizes consumer habits, the real truth unveiled is how quickly and terribly society deteriorates when under siege, and how safe places become hideous traps. To survive, keep moving -- the moving target is hardest to hit.

More than simply fleeing danger, Apocalyptic Wanderlust is fueled by the basic desire for human connection, for families and clans. Dystopian novels often feature characters beginning their journeys alone, then in slowly aggregating communities as the plots progress. In Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Australian survivors of a nuclear war await the arrival of drifting radioactive clouds. When a Morse Code distress signal from North America is picked up, the military dispatches a submarine to investigate; this quest for fellow survivors becomes a major plotline but the novel remains chiefly concerned with how people address their fates, how much quality and grace they carry into their final acts.

Two novels by Stephen King follow a more typical "travel narrative" pattern: The Stand (1978) and Cell (2006). In both books, overnight catastrophe wipes out the majority of the human race, leaving those unharmed by either flu-like plague or brain-frying microwave pulse to suffer dreams and visions which compel them to a common destination (in The Stand, it's Colorado; in Cell, central Maine). Staying alive is not a solitary endeavor, but a common one -- it's going to take a village to reconstruct civilization, after all. Anyone who has endured the calamitous, ongoing aftereffects of severe weather (hurricane, earthquake, tornado, take your pick) understands how important, how inherently logical, neighborly relations are. Permanently wrecked infrastructures of course means the disappearance of law enforcement, the rise of self-deputized vigilantes, not to mention armed highwaymen with a severe case of the Self Interest. Within this void, citizens necessarily become clan members -- continually protective, defensive, wary.

So, as characters strike out for the Unlikely Promised Land, they must also watch their backs. This is the underlying scenario of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), a novel that differs from the usual post-apocalyptic template in one important way: in most cases, whatever disrupted society remains part of the ongoing story, like the tribal struggles over gasoline in George Miller's film The Road Warrior (1981), or how in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) deadly bio-engineered plants have usurped mankind's primary position on the food chain, with plot revolving around efforts to keep the creatures at bay while also seeking permanent sanctuary from them. But in The Road, the only real goal in sight for the unnamed father and his son, heading inexorably south to the coast during relentless nuclear winter, is daily survival. Killers and cannibals roam unchecked through the poisoned landscape, as if the ashen wastelands were not obstacle enough, but man and boy persist because that is all there is to do -- cling to each other and continue.

Like Rod Serling's classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (itself an allegory of the Cold War-related Red Scare), the story is concerned only with what the characters do with the incomplete hands dealt to them -- whether they will act rationally or succumb to hysteria. In many ways, The Road echoes On the Beach, illustrating how disaster and death are not just inevitable, but ever-present -- we shouldn't need a global disaster to remind us how to live and love and take each day to our bosoms like rare treasure.

At the end of McCarthys' novel, there is no ultimate Better Place, only more of the same. While on one hand this contradicts the logic of setting out in the first place, it also underscores the intrinsic importance of believing in a Better Place. That a phoenix might arise from the ashes of the old world, and be waiting at the end of a hard journey, is reason enough. Even when faced with overwhelming odds, hope dies hard -- and that's exactly as it should be. More than youthful vanity or misplaced survival tactics, the drive to outlive an apocalypse -- atomic, viral, or zombified -- is what makes us fully human.

True Grit (1968)

It's a surreal joke, with a winding punchline worthy of Mark Twain: When is the South not the South? When it's the Old Southwest! This shifting literary borderland -- populated by mustache-twirling villains, inept but determined (and uncannily lucky) lawmen, saloon brawlers boasting how they could whup Sampson himself, misunderstood hookers with perfectly calibrated hearts of gold, not to mention Johnson Jones Hooper's infamous Captain Simon Suggs and Twain's own celebrated jumping frogs -- is nowhere funnier than where mapped by Charles Portis in his novel True Grit.

Portis hails from Arkansas, a state many would consider decidedly Southern, and his novel makes affectionate, specific use of the setting: main character Mattie Ross takes bold pride in repeatedly reminding others how things are accomplished in her native Yell County, just for starters. Still, several initial reviews of the book took care to point out the "Western" aspects, with Michael Cleary defining Portis as "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction" in Twentieth-Century Western Writers.

Location-challenged reviewers aside, the story is relatively high concept, and certainly familiar to readers of pulp westerns: the aforementioned Maddie seeks justice for the murder of her father by one of his hired farmhands, Tom Chaney, who has taken up with a band of outlaws led by the nefarious Lucky Ned Pepper. To apprehend (or kill, whichever) the dastardly Chaney, Mattie treks to Fort Smith for the purpose of hiring a lawman with "true grit," and finds near-enough in the figure of Federal Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Also on Chaney's trail is a Texas Ranger, name of La Boeuf; eventually -- and despite their differing motivations, which range from sheer revenge to simple cash reward -- these three ride out together in search of their quarry.

Though the novel could easily carry different genre labels (satire/humor, coming-of-age) at this later date it's no feat to look back and ascertain how True Grit came to be shelved as a Western rather than, say, a Southern (a decent tag which would fit many books, and that some have tried to make stick, though the adhesive apparently still needs work). The initial marketing of the book is not terribly at fault: the first edition jacket design features a simple illustration of a stern-looking young woman holding in one hand the reins of a horse and in the other the barrel of a rifle. While this iconography telegraphs "Western" for sure, it also merely reflects the essential elements of and suggests a time-frame for the tale resting between those covers. True Grit is Mattie's story, in both plot and tone (she's the first-person narrator, recounting her adventure some sixty years after the fact).

But almost unarguably the main reason: scarcely a year following publication, out from the Hollywood hills loped a popular film starring beloved "cowboy actor" John Wayne as Cogburn, a role which finally earned him an Academy Award. But John Wayne alone did not brand True Grit as a Western; the 1969 film takes many liberties with the novel, beginning, importantly, with the setting: the scrubby, mountainous landscape of Ouray County, Colorado, stands in for the Ozarks, and thus does the movie unavoidably "look" like a traditional Horse Opera. (Additionally, the screen version moves Cogburn to front and center, correspondingly muting Mattie's acerbic attitude and commentary -- an undeniable charm of the novel.) Interestingly, Vincent Canby, in his mainly positive review of the film for the July 4, 1969 edition of the New York Times, had this to say: "I couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about when the Charles Portis novel hit the best-selling lists last year. The book was strictly freeze-dried nostalgia, which imitated the flavor of nineteenth-century American writing without ever making you believe it was as good as the real thing (Mark Twain, Bret Harte)."

Though contemporary full reviews of the novel are now scarce, Canby's comments seem to be at odds with those short blurbs and slug lines which do remain accessible, either printed on the front endpapers of the paperback editions or elsewhere. In the New York Times Book Review, Richard Rhodes called the book a "skillfully constructed ... comic tour de force," echoing the sentiments publisher Overlook reprints on their current edition, which also features an afterward by another Southern novelist, Donna Tartt -- who proclaims the book a "masterpiece" even as she notes how well it captures "the Wild West of the 1870s."

It is as though the film, despite its bold differences from the source material, has supplanted within what Carl Jung would pinpoint as our Collective Cultural Consciousness the true character of the novel. In that sense, at least, Mr. Canby has had his way -- despite the fact that Portis' novel sold millions of copies well into the 1970s and for a short while was taught in schools, when most people think of True Grit they are thinking of the film and not the novel, thus bringing to mind stereotypical Western iconography. Meaning: horses, shootouts, lawlessness, and of course John Wayne. (Doesn't help that the latest [2004] edition of the True Grit paperback features silhouetted saguaro cacti -- which grow only in the Sonoran Desert. Does everybody around here need a map?) Of course, American pop culture sensibilities are finer attuned to cinema than to the written word, at present. It could even be argued that many people, in remembering moments from their favorite books, are actually remembering details from the better (or at least most persistently referenced and shown) movies made from them. Motion pictures like To Kill a Mockingbird, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Maltese Falcon, and The Lord of the Rings have all come to be considered as powerful complements, if not outright equals, to their literary sources. (There are even cases -- Love Story, Jaws, even Dracula comes to mind -- where the film treatment might be preferred over the books.)

Assisting this perception, True Grit, despite its initial popularity, remained out-of-print for nearly twenty years. In an essay for Salon, Allen Barra writes: "True Grit's going in and out of print over the last four decades probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature." Which is a fair point. By the mid-1970s, the Western had fallen out of favor; the dime novels and pulps and Saturday serials which had popularized the genre were long gone, Westerns rarely produced in Hollywood anymore, even the long-running TV series Gunsmoke reached the end of its run. And, in favor or not, "Western" is an easier tag to apply than "Southern." Particularly when only remaindered and hand-me-down copies of the novel were available, and the film version had free reign to establish itself in the cultural memory.

Not to put too much blame on the author, but another factor in this slightly askew labeling might well be the sparse, pigeon-hole proof output of Portis himself. His career as a novelist spans from the 1966 publication of Norwood to the 1991 appearance of Gringos; counting also the 2012 essay collection Escape Velocity, Portis has produced only six slender tomes over a five decade period. With topics ranging from ridiculous secret societies to bus-driving cuckolds to UFO hunters lost in Mexico, his novels have only one thing in common: a distinct comic sensibility. Given a one-line description of each, one might reasonably assume all five are the products of different individuals -- particularly since we readers are accustomed to authors tackling recurrent story structures, subjects, themes.

Which brings us back to Mr. Cleary's assertion that Portis is "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction." In the final accounting, given his disparate if slight oeuvre, Portis can no more be counted among the writers of "western fiction" than can be Mark Twain, whom Mr. Canby thinks Portis is clumsily aping. At least Donna Tartt doesn't entirely miss the mark -- the final pages of True Grit do specifically satirize "Wild West" exaggerations, as Rooster is remembered as having become an actor in a travelling circus, cashing in on his rough-n-tumble lawman-of-the-frontier persona. He rode with Quantrill! the handbills for the Cole Younger/Frank James show say, He rode for Parker! -- a brief but snarky reference to the showmanship and commercialized myth-making which still colors popular American perceptions, far contrary to reality, of what the West was like in the last couple decades of the 19th Century. Looks like we all need maps, if not well-researched guidebooks.

Perhaps the grand irony here is, Portis was trying to disassemble the Western, not contribute to the canon. Though it would seem he's been largely misunderstood, given the prevailing comic sensibility of the novel, Portis probably still would argue his joke landed correctly -- squarely on the heads of his audience. Having scribed Mattie's own inflexible worldviews, Portis shows he understands both the folly and the comfort of unchanging perception. And if anyone appreciates the humor of a grapefruit being labeled as an orange, it would surely be Charles Portis.   

Inherent Vice (2009)

In all the commotion typically attending the appearance of a new title by Thomas Pynchon -- considered by many to be the poster boy for Postmodern Literature -- it is often forgotten that he began his career as a bestselling popular novelist. Mass market paperbacks of his first two books, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, had sold a combined three million copies prior to the 1973 publication of Gravity's Rainbow -- a novel for which, shortly after launch, Viking boasted orders of over seven hundred copies per hour. But during the seventeen-year silence leading into Vineland, Pynchon got racked into the category of "literary" (not to mention "difficult") rather than "popular" and while his next three novels made a great deal of additional noise over the publishing landscape, such prior sales numbers proved elusive.

The savvy Pynchon is apparently unwilling to fade into "literary cult author" status -- how else to explain this curious cross-breeding of a Maltese Falcon with a Pink Panther at a time when crime fiction is at a hip zenith? Inherent Vice is exactly what the dust jacket makes it looks like -- streamlined noir, gilded at the edges with a mellow, psychedelic glow. It is 1970 in the LA surf community of Gordita Beach. The Lakers are in the playoffs. The Manson Family is going to trial. And gumshoe (or, as he refers to himself, "gumsandal") Larry "Doc" Sportello is one evening visited by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fey, transmitting bad vibes about her current dalliance, billionaire real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann -- who soon disappears, possibly murdered, leaving Sportello as the chief suspect, at least in the eyes of Sportello's perpetual shadow, LAPD detective Bigfoot Bjornsen.

Sportello (think Phillip Marlowe by way of the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger) spends the rest of the novel trying to clear his name, or to at least keep from being ensnared by Bigfoot. Or something to that effect. Other ingredients include but are not necessarily limited to: a federally-thwarted plan to build domed houses for the poor and homeless; smugglers from Vietnam trafficking in counterfeit bills printed with Nixon's face; a multitude of wigged-out hippies and surfers, some capable of astral travel; an early version of the Internet which interests Doc only so much as it might help him score weed; a set of peculiar neckties, hand-painted with likenesses of nude women (one of whom is Shasta Fey); a cabal of sex-crazed dentists; and a mysterious schooner called the Golden Fang, whose shadowy operators just might be tied to everyone and everything involved.

Like fellow literary lion Cormac McCarthy, who some years back and with great commercial success began shedding a dense, idiomatic, description-centered prose style for leaner, plot-oriented narration, Pynchon here nixes his notoriously recursive and tangential approach(es) to storytelling. The omniscient intrusions and historical flashbacks which extend, deepen, and often contort his previous works are no longer in evidence -- vanished, apparently, into the ever-present smog surrounding Gordita, Pynchon's stand-in location for the Manhattan Beach of his own younger days (where he reportedly wrote a great deal of Gravity's Rainbow). One can almost imagine the author blissfully banging away at his typewriter, serving only the basic needs of his tale, freewheeling as it is -- Vice is nothing short of a classic potboiler (emphasis being on the pot.) It is also a bittersweet portrait of the American culture teetering between the joys of Sgt. Pepper and the grisly angst of Dark Side of the Moon -- and as some have pointed out, the particolored details are likely the closest the World of Letters will get to autobiographical reveals from the famously reclusive Mr. Pynchon.

For all its narrative brevity, speed, and hilarity -- and this might well be Pynchon's funniest book, which is no small statement -- there is a devious undertow at work. Pynchon sends up his own obsessions, elements from previous novels, and the expectations of a devoted readership, but retains his signature moral outrage against imbalances of power. Gravity's Rainbow underlines the weird moralities and opportunities "civilized" countries abuse during wartime -- whatever atrocities can be gotten away with under cover of larger violence; Inherent Vice takes the scarier tack of what can happen in the Homeland when citizens remain willfully unaware of what is happening under the auspices of keeping their streets safe: neighborhood watches suddenly comprised of neo-Nazi wannabe badasses, sub-contracted private firms looking to get into the paramilitary business, all sanctioned by local law enforcement by way of federal monies. It's not hard to imagine how Pynchon feels about Halliburton or the agents of Blackwater.

Against the backdrop of Fear as powered by the atrocities of the Manson Family, fear against the hippies and their Freak Power movement destroying society, Bigfoot constantly attempts to recruit Doc as an informer to aid in various shake-down schemes -- a path Doc dreads Coy Harlingen, the subject of one of his missing persons cases, has already stumbled down. Harlingen was a semi-famous session musician and saxophonist for a surf-rock band called the Boards (now apparently taken over by zombies). Coy's wife, the aptly named Hope, does not believe her husband overdosed on heroin, the official story, but that his death was faked and he is now a federal operative. Whatever the circumstances which led to Coy being taken from her, she doesn't care; she just wants her family back together. As things will turn, repairing this damage will become Doc's primary concern. When, that is, he's sober and straight enough to focus on the mosaic of clues.

Inherent Vice (a term from maritime law, applied to annul potential shipping damages -- i.e. eggs break in transit, reason being: they're eggs) is saturated with images of "the axes of space, now taken away into commotion and ruin." While this initially seems like yet another route into entropy (one of Pynchon's favorite concerns, going back to his eponymously-titled 1958 short story), in Vice that idea is taken a quantum step further. Natives of the coast wander their old neighborhoods, confused by the sudden construction craters where their houses used to be. But the old order isn't being supplanted by the expected chaos: coming to replace the old standalone businesses owned by locals are clean corporate franchises, lined up in strip malls. Pynchon pinpoints a moment in our culture when the detritus inevitably left behind by commercial efforts of change and progress started being packaged and sold: the experience of nostalgia as commodity. Doc, driving past a supermarket-sized record store, takes note of the customers visible just inside the sweeping glass front, each secluded in a soundproof booth; music -- the community glue of that era and an important motif in this novel -- is suddenly an individual rather than a collective experience. The Powers That Be have already begun to divide and conquer, using the easy wedges of simple market forces, supply and demand -- no greater conspiracy seeking control and subservience of a citizenship, such as those that have previously dominated Pynchon's novels, is necessary. If billionaire Mickey Wolfmann has no say in his own development projects, what chance do the rest of us (capable of being bought off with a chili dog, as one character points out in the novel's closing moments) have? Doc himself, no bumbling hippie innocent as might initially appear, eventually drifts into his own, essentially inevitable fog, only mirroring, if not actually following, the leads of those who have hired him or crossed his path.

In Gordita Beach, there's no screaming coming across the sky -- just the sound of the surf, the quiet, relentless surf, eating away at the edge of the continent. Pynchon's apocalypses have become less sweeping, more focused, smarter, meaner, personal. There's an old saying, essentially this: As goes the State of California, so goes the Nation. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's candy-coated warning: the Golden State and all the dreams it stands for, long-understood to be just one good earthquake away from slipping into the Pacific, is soon to be as lost to the rest of us as the mythical continent of Lemuria -- a set of final coordinates for that Golden Fang, perhaps.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Tie-Dyed Noir" September 28 2009

Mr. Sebastian & the Negro Magician (2007)

It's an old storyteller's saw, of course (and rarely, these days, sharp enough to cut a woman in half): ye olde Deal with the Devil. Doctor Faustus, well-known metaphysician and seminal mad scientist, leads the way, providing motivations extant in a legion of fictional satanic pacts ranging from "The Devil and Daniel Webster" to Angel Heart (1987). It's always about getting drunk with some kind of power, influence, maybe a little immortality thrown in for good measure -- a lesser evil of the heart begetting a greater evil in the soul. And it never turns out very damned well.

Daniel Wallace, with the fantastic Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, subverts the Genre of Devilish Dealings by removing the aforementioned motivations. Our hero isn't a wrong-minded egomaniac looking for the secrets of the universe, but a mere boy, Henry Walker, lodged at a painful crossroads. It is the grainy depths of the Great Depression, his mother recently dead, his father fallen from Wall Street mogul to destitute hotel janitor, and his beloved, angelic sister Hannah has decided she loves a stray dog (which she names Joan Crawford) more than him.

Henry stumbles from grace via a chance meeting with "Mr. Sebastian" (if that is his real name), a peculiar pasty-skinned gentleman who offers to teach Henry some nifty magic tricks, most of them to do with a deck of ordinary cards -- but Henry must vow to never reveal the source of his artistry, which turns out to be shockingly powerful, if not borderline sinister: along with the preternatural sleight-of-hand technique comes powers of telekinesis, teleportation, and conjuring. Henry can just as easily make a full-course meal appear from thin air as he can commune with the newly dead. By the pricking of their thumbs and the mingling of their blood, Henry's fate entwines with the murky wishes of Mr. Sebastian -- who then vanishes into the aether, with Hannah in tow. Henry will spend the rest of his life searching for her, in one way or another.

This tragic story is told in a series of secondhand flashbacks by Henry's former fellow sideshow performers, who knew him at the end of his career as a hysterically inept magician barely managing, thanks only to the color of his skin, to find work. Like a giddy mash-up of The Canterbury Tales and Carnivale, we meet Rudy, the "Strongest Man in the World" (who actually is far from it), Jenny the Ossified Girl (who, as a woman passively rejected by Henry, is best able to tell the doomed tale of his One True Love), JJ the Barker (who seems to confuse his own childhood memories -- specifically his feelings about his father -- with those of Henry), and Jeremiah Mosgrove, the proprietor of Mosgrove's Chinese Circus (which is in no way Chinese), as well as a few other figures who emerge from Henry's past, both real and imagined. Each of these characters is privy only to a particular part of Henry's life story, parts which eventually connect even as they contradict each other. Depending on who is doing the telling, Henry is depicted by turns as a miracle worker, a broken-down con artist, a heartsick lover, or a lost soul in perpetual mourning over his departed family, still seeking revenge against the man who took it all away from him. Or all of the above.

The stunning centerpiece of the novel concerns Henry's love for his stage assistant, the willowy, troubled Marianne La Fleur, a creature ever fluttering on the border between Life and Death. Henry conceives a magic show -- part trickery, part séance -- around an eerie aspect of their relationship that has his audiences gasping simultaneously in admiration and utter horror. Henry ultimately defines himself by his losses; his signature card trick involves the Three of Hearts: one heart each for his departed mother, his vanished sister, and his unattainable Marianne. And being the performer, knowing the foul secrets of his magic disallows Henry the gifts of wonder and hope and laughter he is able to bestow upon his audiences. Believing in nothing, he is shrouded in his own lies and illusions.

It won't be until he encounters a trio of hoodlum hecklers that Henry at last remembers magic isn't about the trick, believing isn't always about the truth, and that his illusions don't have to be as real as he's made them. The Devil, as it turns out, really isn't in the details -- those small, beautiful, ordinary moments of our lives. It's the fact that we take such moments for granted that is a true evil. "Only love can take us to the darkest places," a character eventually remarks, underlining the double-edged, tragic-comic nature both of this story and of the approach Wallace takes in telling it.

Following three works of, essentially, shorter fiction, with Mr. Sebastian Wallace inherits the storied mantle in American Letters previously shouldered by Ray Bradbury, master of simultaneously sentimental and wicked observation -- a delicate and bittersweet trick indeed, one capable of revealing the innermost chambers of the human heart. (This book, in fact, makes a fitting companion to Bradbury’s equally wonderstruck carnival tale Something Wicked This Way Comes.) We might allow magicians to trick us, but it's love that will ultimately make fools of us all.

Meanwhile, the sideshow parade only seems familiar to the Wallace canon -- circus freaks peopled the Big Fish movie, but the citizenry of the novel was more mythical in nature; this is an illusion/allusion that Wallace, perhaps, fully intended -- here using freaks and misfits to mis-remember, mis-tell, and just plain mistake the true story of Henry Walker, and carry it into the realm of lofty folklore, reminding us how ordinary lives fit into the larger pattern of human history. The tale, as such, flows like an unexpectedly long string of particolored handkerchiefs from the pocket of a skilled and charming prestidigitator, one who always keeps a knowing eyebrow lifted towards his audience, luring them with a recognizable trick, only to unleash an unexpected but heartbreakingly appropriate flourish at the end -- a tale that is transcendently amusing in its variety, startling in its unregulated humor, bewitching in its final originality. This is, simply enough, one of the best, most captivating books of the year. And it's impossible not to wonder what tricks Daniel Wallace yet has hidden up his sleeve.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Bigger Fish Swim in Wallace's Latest," Aug 19 2007

Against the Day (2006)

James Thurber once said, "There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures." There is also a middle ground, a Twilight Zone between these two qualities: contre-jour, "against daylight," a photographic term for backlighting, that moment when the glare and the glow meet, and the outer edges of foreground subjects begin to disappear into the light beyond them.

It is in exactly just such an area that Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day takes place. As though assembled from those split seconds occurring between the flash of the bulb and the chemical alchemy of the silver nitrate that will eventually form a frozen image, Pynchon delivers a sprawling photomosaic of the World That Was in the decades prior to WWI -- itself heralded by a mysterious, supernatural "heavenwide blast of light" in the wastes of Siberia on June 30th, 1908 -- over a century distant from the present time, yet perhaps an event that still illuminates, if not irradiates, this familiar world.

The novel begins in pure innocence as the Chums of Chance (five young, bickering zeppelin pilots who, along with their literate dog Pugnax, happen to be the heroes of a series of adolescent adventure novels) descend upon the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. But it isn't long before the narrative focuses instead on a temporary passenger assigned to the Chums, the hapless Lew Basnight, a proto-noir private detective who has committed an unspeakable crime unknown to himself but that nevertheless has alienated him from society ... before switching to the power schemes of railroad tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, a kind of cross between John D. Rockefeller and Snidely Whiplash ... then on to photographer and amateur chemist Merle Rideout and his daughter Dally, as they cross the American heartland, into Colorado where they fall in with anarchist dynamiter Webb Traverse ... Wait! What happened to those Chums?

They'll be back in a few hundred pages. Pynchon wouldn't be Pynchon without a little sleight of hand, a few red herrings wiggling upstream. After all, the Chums exist in a kind of fictional universe, parallel to the universe where the rest of the characters exist ... just as that universe, in turn, is parallel to our own, a place of suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map -- as if, to be brought to any shelter, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto undefined.

The yarn of Against the Day is spun mainly from the lifelines of the Traverse family, beginning with kooky anarchist/domestic terrorist Webb and continuing to his four children -- sons Reef, Frank, and Kit, and daughter Lake -- who scatter to the respective winds following their father's murder at the hands of a hired gun, Deuce Kindred. Reef tries marriage but is more at home as a swindler and dynamite handler, like his old man -- shifty employ that keeps him tuned to the underground, just in case he should ever find the will to act upon his weak desire for revenge against Deuce. It is Frank, meanwhile, disappearing into the desert landscape and eventually becoming a cog in the Mexican Revolution, who learns that blood spilled in retribution will not necessarily equal redemption. Kit tries to break family ties by attending engineering school in Europe -- but his scholarship comes by way of Scarsdale Vibe, the man who likely paid to have Webb killed for blowing up his railroad lines. It is Lake who binds herself most closely to a sense of disastrous familial legacy and fate, by marrying Deuce -- knowing full well his role in her father's death. (The Traverse family tree, incidentally, ultimately branches all the way into Vineland.)

While the Traverse children are the tesseract cornerstone of the novel, their numerous associates receive if not equal then certainly quality time. Along with Basnight, the Rideouts, the Vibes, and the Chums, there is Professor Vanderjuice, a kind of mad scientist, studying the aether and delving into time travel; Yashmeen Halfcourt, a gorgeous "polymorphous prodigy" and schoolmate of Kit who is capable of warping space through sheer mathematical computation; the Zombini family, traveling magicians who create doppelgangers of their stage volunteers by using mirrors made of the refracting calcite Iceland Spar; an enclave of pseudo-spiritualists known as T.W.I.T. (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys); and Cyprian Latewood, a fop who seems to have been teleported in from an Evelyn Waugh novel, most likely The Loved One. It's a cavalcade often bordering on being a parade of names, only a few of which will morph into full characters. Pynchon favors characteristics over characterizations; it is his forte, and the subjects in Against the Day are every bit as lifelike and as valid as Prince Florizel and company in Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights, or for that matter the legion of wacky servicemen in Heller's Catch-22. By abdicating any deep psychological qualities not relevant to the matters as hand, Pynchon frees himself to render a world that refracts through his characters.

And it is an eerie, doomed world, indeed. Though the principals never articulate it, they clearly feel the boom being lowered, as the century turns and the War approaches, as from a dark cloud bristling with lightning. Pynchon treks into the metaphorical sci-fi terrain most frequented by Ray Bradbury, and retrofits history in the same fashion that Area 51 scientists supposedly reverse-engineer crashed UFO parts into our own, less advanced aircraft. Characters meet shadows of themselves: Trespassers, they are called -- ghosts from the future who have come to warn, or perhaps mourning time travelers who want to revisit what is to be lost; it is never made sure. Meanwhile, among comical Star Trek and Doctor Who allusions, a military search is underway to locate the fabled land of Shambhala, to secure a backup paradise before the greater world is lost. And finally a device is invented that extrapolates information from photographs, allowing views into either the past or the future, moments beyond the shutter click -- suggesting that all of history is only some kind of false memory, anyway. A trick of the light.

Pynchon's first five novels -- from the paranoid quiltwork of V. to the giddy, melancholy divisionism of Mason & Dixon -- are all stories of wrong-minded, impossible, disrupted quests. Against the Day breaks this tradition, and Pynchon, late in his career, boldly sets off in a new direction -- a move that seems to have disoriented some critics. Ironically, it is his esteemed Gravity's Rainbow that is often described as a plotless, unstructured beast. That novel actually has a definite though deliberately incomplete structure -- the book even ends in mid-sentence to point this out. Here at last, Pynchon has turned in the novel he has been accused of for thirty-five years: there is no plot device outside the simple passage of time.

As such, the novel runs like, well, like clockwork. Exactly like clockwork, actually -- gears clicking, cogs a-spin, cuckoos and all, chiming at intervals dictated by a kernel mechanism just out of sight. Though some might say the trouble with clocks is that they measure something you're never going to get to the end of, the pacing is ingenious: the multiple storylines alternate for exact amounts of time -- just long enough to introduce some new tantalizing thread, or provide symbolic echo for one of the other episodes. Like Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, I suspect it would be possible to read the stories separate from each other, that Against the Day -- like the split beams of light that comprise the novel's controlling metaphor -- would come apart just as easily as Pynchon has put it together.Though there may be no tangible plot, don't be fooled -- this by no means signals a dearth of story. In fact, Pynchon throws away more story elements than most novelists employ in a full career. Through 1,085 pages of slapstick encounters, thwarted intentions, and sinister conspiracies both explicit and alluded to, he still only skims the surface of the world he's imagining. This is no shaggy dog narrative -- the narrative is the shaggy dog, a tail-wagging catalog of visions of the unexpected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God's unseen world.

Long discussed as our one living writer capable of inheriting the literary mantle of Melville, Pynchon is actually shooting for the throne of Cervantes, here. And with this much story afoot, this many characters, this much mischief, Pynchon exhibits an astonishing restraint. Absent are the massive, brain-crushing narrative monologues, the characteristically arcane and cryptic ramblings; his tangents are now controlled, precise. What once took entire passages is now often done in a few words -- a remarkable, heartbreaking economy, redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. This is lightning that strikes right out of the bottle.

Yes, Pynchon still has his fastball, after demonstrating a deceptive curveball (Vineland) and wicked slider (Mason & Dixon). His style is again historically (not to mention hysterically) affected -- this time it's chiefly an era-appropriate turn-of-the-20th-Century idiom; think Arthur Conan Doyle on mescal. (I'm quick to imagine a hypothetical audio book, read by a smirking Orson Welles.) What's too often forgotten in the discussions of Pynchon's word games and conceptual puzzles is that the man can flat-out write. In his dreamlike prose, all described action takes on the thrust of greater import, of movement toward revelation. Descriptions of social conditions, mathematical theories, even just passing landscapes turn into roaring visual sweeps, the royal thunder of genius coming over the mountain -- a sound not heard since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow. The resulting reading experience is both luxurious and unsettling, very like a moment of post-lunch midday drowsing that results in vibrant, unlooked for flashes from the deepest parts of the brain.

Against the Day is, ultimately, that kind of book, demanding to be read on its own time, for a reader to pay attention, to actually read, a simple thing we sometimes forget to do in an age when books are too often expected to behave like television shows and merely distract us. Distraction is, after all, the last thing Pynchon is after. How else to explain the fierce moment he brings the proceedings to a halt, some 150 pages in, to describe a terrible tragedy in a city that must be Manhattan -- Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes ... but with only dwindling moments of normal history remaining, where could any of them have found refuge in time?

Using history both real and imagined, Pynchon creates a world that floats off the page, into our own, and beyond. People see the world differently -- which must necessarily mean, according to the logic of Against the Day, there are different worlds to see. Parallel universes have long been Pynchon’s main concern -- on landscapes divided between the Haves and the Have Nots, he ever takes the side of those forgotten by history: the Passed Over, the Preterites, the Thanatoids. And now, the Trespassers, lost somewhere between a real doomed world and a paradise that probably never existed, not even in memory. Where does the truth lie? Was there a moment, now unreachable, where things took a terrible turn, and the world split, leaving us in the Bad one, while the Good one goes on spinning right next to us, but always out of reach?

Well, to paraphrase one of Against the Day's many characters, the "truth" is never as important as what lessons you might learn from the events themselves, however distorted they may appear to be. But ultimately Pynchon leaves us to our own devices, we Constant Readers, lost, ourselves -- for in the end, we are the Trespassers into the world of Against the Day. And the fractured reality we see within is only a reflection of our own.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, May 13 2007

Being Harper Lee

I don't know Harper Lee, and I don't pretend to. I know some people who do know her -- but this is like saying "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." So when Charles Shields contacted me last fall about the biography he was putting together, I spoke to him more out of my own curiosity than anything else. What could I know that could possibly be of interest? He was surely scraping the bottom of the barrel, calling me.

And there are arguments to be made that Mockingbird: a Portrait of Harper Lee is composed primarily of barrel scrapings: Shields did not have access to Lee herself, and many of her closest compatriots were loyally mum. Still, like any mulligan stew, the success lies in how you combine the elements you do have on hand. Given that this particular stew is one for which people have been hungering for some time, the question becomes: How much flavor can something have when there's no main ingredient?

The book concentrates on the obvious eras: Lee's childhood and college years; her early period in Manhattan during the writing and revising of To Kill a Mockingbird; the time spent with Capote researching In Cold Blood in Kansas; the release of her book and then the film version; and finally an essentially speculative section, only fifty pages or so, devoted to the time since 1965. To flesh out what little is known, Shields uses heaping helpings from previously published biographies of Truman Capote, Gregory Peck, and Horton Foote. He's collected a multitude of interviews with and articles about people who surrounded Lee at one time (it seems he dug up every article ever published that even mentions Lee's name, quite a feat of research). Though of questionable value, there's also an abundance of first-hand accounts from people who claim to be former classmates, childhood friends, and other varieties of distant acquaintance. 

Even with his careful reliance upon this bounty of sources, Shields misses crucial inconsistencies and downright contradictions that prove the fallibility of such varied subjectivity: in describing A.C. Lee, the man whom so many believe is the template for Atticus Finch, neighbors recall him being "detached... not particularly friendly" and further say "the image of facing down the crowd of rough necks has never rung true to me." But a page later, without comment, come two hearty, if slightly at-odds, accounts of A.C. facing down a group of Klansmen. Shields also leads himself into some early, unwarranted speculation about the personality of Lee's mother; by the time he offhandedly admits, late in the book, such views come from mistaken (or intentionally mistaken) accounts, the damage is done -- he has perpetuated the error. 

It is reasonable to assume that a reader wishing to better understand the author of To Kill a Mockingbird would appreciate a detailed description of small town life in Monroeville during the 1930s and the prototype personalities and events that would eventually find their way into Lee and Capote's stories (the Jewish store owner who knowingly sold bedsheets to Klan members; the snuff-addicted baker of fruitcakes; the Monroe County court case that became the basis for Tom Robinson's trial). The book is therefore flush with ornamental, atmospheric, secondary detail. While impressive and engrossing, it ultimately becomes testament to the Invisible Center: Shields at one point spends six lines of text describing the functions of an Underwood typewriter. 

He makes the same miscalculation later on, describing the Clutter investigation and initially making the most of newly unearthed materials from the Capote Papers at the New York Public Library -- but buries the effort by piling on information (a four-page room-by-room description of the Clutter home, mainly devoid of any firsthand accounting) that can be more effectively gleaned from the pages of In Cold Blood itself.
 
The book is most effective when Shields stands back and lets Lee speak for herself. Good use -- revealing Shields' reverence for his subject -- is made of excerpts from the University of Alabama publications Crimson White and Rammer Jammer; Lee wrote for both during her time there. Even better are the snippets from interviews conducted during press junkets following both the 1960 publication of Mockingbird and the release of the film version a handful of years later. All of the excerpts showcase Lee's warm personality, not to mention wicked wit. (An authorized collection of these first-hand materials, framed only by editorial, contextual narration, would make a great read -- though such a beast seems unlikely to appear any time soon.)

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On a chilly November evening in 2005, I entered the Capri Theatre in Montgomery and settled in to watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the title role of Capote. Even in understanding that the film was a speculative, compressed take on the investigation of the Clutter murders that led into the writing of In Cold Blood, I was taken out of the experience each time Catherine Keener appeared onscreen as "Harper Lee." I knew by the report of a mutual friend that Ms. Lee had indeed already seen the film and, though she reportedly thought Hoffman did a fair enough job, was largely dismissive of its many inaccuracies.

I could not keep from wondering how uncommonly weird it must be to live a complete life, quite like anyone else, but for a moment or two, decades prior, when you had a hand in something extraordinary and which left a profound legacy. And for someone to then make a movie about that legacy, that singular moment from your life, without your input or consent. A movie that then hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people see. I tried to think about how I might feel if someone in Hollywood made a film about something that happened in my life during, say, my college years (our intramural water polo team, while not heroic on the order of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, did, in fact, rock). Would they get the details right? What would it be like to look into the 30-foot face of my onscreen avatar and think, Some of this is right ... but the rest is all wrong?

About a month later, I was contacted by Charles Shields. His research had led him to an old essay I wrote for the Mobile Register Sunday book review page, describing how I tackled the popular Alabama parlor-game of half-baked speculation regarding whether or not Truman Capote had actually written To Kill a Mockingbird by reading Mockingbird and In Cold Blood back-to-back and, observing the different styles and tones, concluding that a kindergartner could figure out the truth of it. I was rewarded for this exercise by a phone call from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. You can surmise that it was, indeed, Harper Lee -- Truman Capote having been dead since 1984. Not to mention, our mutual friend Wayne Greenhaw confirmed the call, chuckling, "She doesn't make a lot of those." For a while, I included short account of this interaction as a "postscript" to my essay, but finally excised it since, frankly, it's more fun to tell in person, with added jokes and detail and whatnot; that Shields could use the Way Back Machine to access it anyway is a reminder that the Internets never forget.

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Meanwhile, there is no disputing the mystique surrounding the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. But I don't think you can pin it down easily by attributing it to a "literary mystery" regarding her singular output and long silence. After all, go tell it to Emily Bronte. I don't think the ongoing fascination has, at its core, anything much to do with Lee's personal choices -- that is just a symptom. The fascination, truly, is deeper -- having much less to do with Lee herself than is comfortable to admit.

We live in a culture that equates success not only with cash flow but with notoriety, where the media feeds on personalities who are famous for being famous -- a phenomenon so common, it's become an accepted joke. Lee is someone who bucks all expectations, who has achieved unqualified success in her chosen field of endeavor, and who has subsequently chosen the joy and satisfaction of simply having done Good Work. There is no evidence of a drive to better what, perhaps, could not be bettered. Not even the apparent need to ride the self-satisfying gravy train of celebrity that could certainly accompany Being Harper Lee -- at any moment, she could pick up the phone and start making the talk show and lecture circuits. But there's really no need. The literary and popular stature of To Kill a Mockingbird is above and beyond any aid she could give at this point.

And I'm banking that Harper Lee knows it. So she has chosen for herself the dignity of a quiet, normal life. Being the woman who wrote a book that defines a watershed moment in American culture and has touched and inspired millions -- millions -- of human beings around the planet, she chooses, courageously, to let her Good Work speak for itself.

For many of us, that choice -- the conundrous decision to not behave like a famous person when in fact it is always within her ability, at any moment, to do so -- is baffling. The unfortunate thing is that it should not be. We should all just aspire to have a little value in our lives, to do a spot of Good Work, find pleasure in it, and move on.

Atticus himself would ask of us little more than that.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, July 23 2006