Review + Excerpt: Purple America (Rick Moody)

Purple America isn’t a book I’d read again, but it was worth reading once.

I have a strange fascination with books about small town suburban America with its picket fences and depressing diners and general air of stagnation, but when I actually read them I always realize it takes a gifted writer to prevent the dead air and dull humdrumness he describes from taking over. Don DeLillo succeeds at times in Underworld, but even his considerable skills weren’t enough to prevent White Noise from becoming one of those books I finished just for the sake of finishing.

Rick Moody writes well enough to save Purple America from the same fate as White Noise. There isn’t a lot in the book that lends itself well to excerpting, but here’s one passage.

“…Hex Raitliffe prays the Great American prayer, the American psalm, the prayer of infants, though to whom he prays is unclear – Anglican New Testament God of the church of his parents? Interdenominational and mostly secular god of his liberal arts education? More likely, as with his fellow Americans, he supplicates now to a provisionally devised personal deity, made up on the spot, reasonably all-powerful, completely generous, adapted from Hollywood and rock and roll and moonlight on water. He prays to this God, with burnt offering, G-g-get me out of this, get me out of this one fix, I’ll do anything.”

Unfortunately, although the last few chapters are among the best, there’s a fair amount of dreck in the middle which I skimmed over, and the biggest downfall of the book for me was that it never quite lived up to the promise of its incredible first chapter, which is somewhat in the same vein as the beginning of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, except it expresses the same amount of unsentimental heartbreak a lot more concisely and unconventionally.

You can read the beginning of AHWOSG here, but unfortunately I can’t find online excerpts for Purple America. Go into a bookstore and read the first chapter. Seriously. It’s one of those passages I come across every now and then in books which painfully reminds me that I can’t write for shit. As I said, it’s just a pity the rest of the book doesn’t maintain that exceptional quality.

Old Friends

Boxes and dust have been the order of the day, or rather, the order of the early morning hours between midnight and six, which is when I do the most of anything useful.

My family moved house while I was in London, and I’ve been going through the boxes from the old house bit by bit. I’m doing books first, deciding which ones actually get to live on shelves in the new room, and which ones get consigned to a box high up in a cupboard. It’s not always easy. Dealing with stuff at home is always immensely more complicated than in England, because here I have to make decisions about the accumulated sentimental junk of twenty years rather than four.

Childhood books are an issue. Some books get Shelf Status with little or no agonizing involved: the Narnian Chronicles, which I really must reread now adulthood informs me that Aslan’s meant to represent more than just a really noble lion; the Borribles books, certainly the darkest and bloodiest children’s books I’ve ever read, but also the most gripping and imaginative by far. But what about the Roald Dahls? Do I concede that I only reread them once every couple of years, and box them up, or do I grant them a precious place just because we go waaaaay back? And if I let the Roald Dahls onto the Shelves, how can I then deny space to the Dick King-Smiths, the Joan Aikens, the Enid Blytons, the E. Nesbits, the Colin Danns, the Judy Blumes, the Nancy Drews? How can I, with a clear conscience, banish I Am David and Malgudi Days and The Secret Garden and My Side Of The Mountain and White Fang and Grimble to the Box of the Unloved and Abandoned?

Faced with difficult decisions like these the other night, I dealt with the situation like an adult. I piled the books back in the boxes, found my old collection of Asterix comics, and read them till 6 AM, at which point my mother woke up for work, saw the light under my door, came in horrified, and nagged me into bed.

Excerpt: The Singapore Story: Memoirs Of Lee Kuan Yew

I may have had to wait four years to wrestle The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew away from the rest of my family, but at least I’m finally reading it. It’s great. Here’s a passage:

“By his unpredictable and inconsistent twists and turns, Marshall had alienated not just myself and the Liberal Socialists, but his key Labour Front members. His wanting to restart the talks to save himself was too much for them. “You cannot eat your own vomit,” as one Liberal Socialist delegate put it in vivid Hokkien. Half an hour into the meeting, Marshall knew that if he tried to resume negotiations, he would have to do so on his own. He had overplayed his hand and was isolated.

That night, he went to a performance of Madam Butterfly with Lennox-Boyd and Lady Patricia Boyd, and then on to a Spanish restaurant to dine to the tune of guitars and the stamping feet of flamenco dancers. Meanwhile, I decided to stop him from staging a recovery. At a press conference that same evening at Malaya Hall, I made it clear that the PAP would have nothing to do with a reopening of the conference. I said it was a ‘final, desperate attempt to hang on to office, a sign of incredible political ineptitude’, and rounded it off with ‘Never in the history of colonial evolution has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by so erratic a leadership.’ “

Excerpts: Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

I first read Jane Eyre when I was eight. I never thought I appreciated it on a level higher than that of a trashy romance novel, but rereading it this past week seems to suggest it may have influenced me in ways I wasn’t aware of at the time. In teenage years I developed (and still hold to) characteristics and views extraordinarily similar to hers, but I certainly never consciously sought to emulate her.

On the self:

“I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give”…”Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.”

On hating how most of your fellow females talk to men:

“Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it – to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace…”

On how to address the man you are completely in love with, after being separated from him for ages, and meeting again to find him blind, crippled and morose:

“Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?”
“What for, Jane?”
“Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”
“Am I hideous, Jane?”
“Very, sir: you always were, you know.”

Jane rocks.

Wrong G-Word

Oh dear. You know you’re working too hard when out of the corner of your bored, roving eye you read the review excerpt on the back of your copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned as:

“A prose that has the tough delicacy of a gusset.”
– New York Review of Books

and you’re like “A gusset? Ewwwww!” and then you look closer and it was garnet, which makes much more sense.

Unhappily Distracted

When you are one week away from dissertation deadline, and are so worried about being wastefully distracted from your finely-honed dissertation production routine that you have taken the dramatic step of packing up laptop, books, photocopied articles and a couple days’ worth clothing and hefting it all to Alec’s hopefully distraction-free flat, you don’t expect to find yourself having read two entire non-dissertation material books in two days at the end of it all.

Given that the last author you mentioned reading on this site was Salman Rushdie, it is even less expected that these two books will both have been written by Tony Hawks. Let me explain.

On Monday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed Alec’s bookcase. I should say, for the sake of fairness, that it does contain many fine volumes brimming with literary merit, but I don’t like that over breakfast when I am trying to write a dissertation, which is why I decided The Vision Of Dante (1894 edition, respect!), and Baudelaire, The Complete Verse would have to wait. Here were some of my other options:

  • Classic Irish Whisky, Jim Murray. Too basic. After all, I am an authority on Classic Irish Whisky Breath and have no need for such entry-level efforts.
  • The Catechism Of The Catholic Church. Perhaps some other time.
  • The Story Of Lucy Gault, William Trevor. I would have read this, but after Two Lives recently felt like struggling my way through a literary quicksand of depression and tragedy, I need a little time before my next foray into William Trevor world.
  • Playing The Moldovans At Tennis, Tony Hawks

Well, there you go then. It was riveting. I confessed my daytime exploits to Alec who found this highly amusing given my usual literary pretension.

On Tuesday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed the bookcase again. Here were further options:

  • Les Miserables (Volume Two). No volume one. Go figure.
  • On The Genealogy Of Morals, Nietzsche. A gift from me, I must confess. He read it politely. I owe me no such politeness.
  • The Ultimate Pipe Book, Richard Carleton Hacker. See entry for Classic Irish Whisky.
  • Round Ireland With A Fridge, Tony Hawks.

So Alec calls at lunch and asks solicitously how I’m doing with the dissertation. “Well,” I venture with quavering, self-hating voice, “Tony’s just left Ennistymon, they wanted to take the fridge scuba-diving but thought better of it in the end.”

Fury (Salman Rushdie) – First Impressions

Fury contains an overwhelming maelstrom of socio-economic-cultural-political-philosophical-mythological-literary-you-name-it-he-references-it references Rushdie pulls out and brandishes before the (probably, well anyway I am) less well-read reader.

My first reaction to this is to feel very stupid. I mean yeah, when he talks of Spinoza and Derrida, I know they’re philosophers; when he refers to Alex Portnoy and Mr Roth I know he means Philip; and when he mentions Jil Sander power suits and Marcus Schenkenberg hell yeah I know what he’s talking about there, but when he describes a building with a cornerstone etching of “to Pythianism”, I’m afraid I must admit I was unaware that this was a clash of Greek and Mesopotamian metaphors, or that Pytho was the ancient name of Delphi, or that Pythian verse is written in the dactylic hexameter, so thank you for telling me, Mr Rushdie.

My second reaction is that he’s trying a little too hard. In describing a girl, I don’t quite get the need to include that she is wearing a black D’Angelo Voodoo baseball cap, except so that Rushdie can say look at me peeps, I still got love fo’ the streets. When describing a commercial featuring a group of fashionable vampires wearing Ray-Bans, I don’t quite get the need to explain that “thanks to Buffy on TV, vampires were hot”. It’s something I noted about The Ground Beneath Her Feet as well. I can’t say there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that I have this recurring mental image of Salman Rushdie doing Dr Evil’s “I’m cool…I’m hip…t-chk-a-chk-a-chk-a etc.” routine, and it’s kinda scary.

But it’s early days yet. I’m only 49 pages into the book, and although I may poke a little fun at him now and then, Salman Rushdie is still a writer whose mastery and flair with the English language makes me quail and kowtow and wonder why the hell anyone ever bothers reading this website when they could be reading Salman Rushdie.

Billy Collins

I love finding new (new to me, anyway) poets to explore. Last week’s Saturday Poem(s) in the Guardian Review were by Billy Collins. Today seems to be about most of the days we’ve been having lately, if you ignore the biting cold that strangely crept in with the sunbeams in the past two.

I went looking for more, and ended up with quite a haul. Introduction To Poetry and Dear Reader seem like good ones to start with.

Man Listening To Disc and Marginalia are creepily accurate portrayals of aspects of my two main preoccupations.

Japan is beautifully erotic. Picnic, Lightning is about those sudden moments of clarity that elevate the mundane to the meaningful, and is also incidentally hosted on Nabokovilia, a pretty cool site that collects and explains Nabokov references in other literary works.

(If anyone wants to buy me The Annotated Lolita, please feel free. If not, then please buy it for yourself, it’s fantastic. In related news, I’m currently marvelling my way through The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, which, though not even ranked among Nabokov’s better books, still beats almost everything else I’ve read recently hands down.)

I Hate You, Dan Rhodes (A Timoleon Vieta Come Home Review)

I read Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Dan Rhodes) in the train on the way to Newcastle, also listening to Roxette’s greatest hits album (laugh all you like, I’m secure in my music obsessiveness. For the record, the other albums I listened to on the way were Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights and Extra Yard: The Bouncement Revolution, a Big Dada compilation) at the same time.

I really, really liked the book. It was extremely funny, written in the sort of effortlessly readable prose that I tend to be too indisciplined in my writing to manage, and packed a hell of an emotional wallop while actively resisting cliché. But it left me in bits, and I need someone to blame. Read on.

Timoleon Vieta (a mongrel with beautiful eyes) was trying to find his way home after being abandoned in Rome by his owner (Cockroft, a former pops orchestra conductor, now a sad has-been living in Tuscany), under the influence of a manipulative object of infatuation (a mysterious figure known as the Bosnian). Timoleon Vieta was living on rats and bin scavengings, slinking along barely noticed, his skinny belly close to the ground, tired and hungry and sad, and then Roxette sang “I guess loneliness found a new friend”, and my heart almost broke.

I went on through the book, through instance after instance of how our imaginations eagerly build up hopes for happy and meaningful futures, through the slow agonizing creep of disbelief when those hopes start to be eroded or are destroyed in one fell swoop, through Cockroft’s desperation for some company, any company, that won’t eventually leave him without a backward glance, through Timoleon Vieta’s aching paw pads on his long journey home, and then I came to the ending, where my imagination’s hope for a heartwarming resolution to all this pain was cruelly dashed in exactly the same way it had happened to almost everyone else in the book.

I closed the book and sat back destroyed, watching the countryside race heartlessly past, and then I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt started up.

I hate you, Dan Rhodes. I hate you, Roxette. And I’m not even a dog person.