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.

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.

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.

Review: Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)

When I was fourteen or fifteen I read a trashy romance novel called Perfect by Judith McNaught. It was about a Hollywood superstar (male, ruggedly handsome) framed for the murder of his wife, escaping from jail and taking a hostage (female, beautiful, feisty) in his bid for freedom. They drive across the country to his remote log cabin in snowy mountains, bonding along the way despite their implacably opposed positions in the situation. Yet even as she gradually comes to believe he is an innocent man, and he is falling more and more in love with her despite himself, the fact that she is important only as his shield from police gunfire lurks continually in the background. Things come to a head one night in the cabin. His paranoia explodes into fury. Terrified, she tries to escape. In pursuit, he comes to a frozen river and thinks her car has gone through the ice. He plunges in to try and rescue her, risking his own life. She saves him, and from then on they take on the world, prove his innocence and celebrate their new-found love. He takes her to parties in Hollywood and she dances with Patrick Swayze and Kevin Costner. Happy ever after. The end.

Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) is Perfect, minus the great sex. Terrorists storm posh party in poor Latin-American country hoping to take President hostage, but it turns out the President skipped the party in order to watch his favourite soap opera. Yes, really. Terrorists say “Oh, poo” but decide to keep everyone else hostage anyway. Japanese CEO of behemoth electronics corporation and opera singer fall madly in love despite the small glitch of not being able to speak the same language. Everyone else also falls madly in love with opera singer, by the way, because she’s beautiful and her voice is wonderful, wonderful, Maria Callas and Kiri Te Kanawa eat your hearts out; it makes grown men cry and gives young terrorists hard-ons in ways that jungle warfare never did; no one can think of anything more wonderful than sitting and listening to her sing all day, every day, because of course everyone loves opera. CEO’s translator and young girl terrorist called Carmen (aha, allusion!) also fall madly in love, but oh my God, she’s a terrorist and he’s a hostage, how will it all end?

[Spoilers follow]

It ends, my friends, in tragedy. The terrorists have been making ridiculous demands – freeing of prisoners, aid programmes, a Playstation 2 for every member of the organization etc., and the government won’t budge. Special forces decide after a couple of months of sitting around scratching their balls that yeah, they should probably storm the compound. In a cruel twist of fate, Japanese CEO is killed trying to protect Carmen the girl terrorist (I forgot to mention that all the hostages and the terrorists really get along by now. It’s quite a love-in. They play football and all, although I think the Latin-American Terrorists vs Japanese Electronics Corporation People fixture would have been a bit of a foregone conclusion). Translator and opera singer are heartbroken. How will they recover from this loving and losing? They will marry each other, that’s how, even if they displayed not a jot of romantic interest in each other all the time they were imprisoned (well, the translator did proposition the opera singer for sex, but that was on behalf of the CEO). They marry in Puccini’s birthplace, and will live in Italy, where opera singers should live. Happy ever after. The end.

I’m thinking the people who gave this book the Orange Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award must have seen something in it that I’m not seeing. I’m thinking I wasted a few days’ worth of reading time on this. I’m thinking Judith McNaught should be sitting in a room somewhere really pissed off.

Neverwhere

I re-read Neverwhere, after chatting to Luke, who was reading it for the first time. I love this book quite madly, probably due to the combination of loving Neil Gaiman and loving London madly as well.

I love the way the hugely different worlds of London Above and London Below overlap, yet don’t quite merge, at stations of the London Underground. The Gap is a ravenous predatorial pouncing fog if you’re from London Below, as opposed to the minor hazard we’re told to Mind by a disembodied voice that’s become background noise to most of us. If you get off at British Museum (long-closed to London Above), ads for moustache wax and two shilling seaside holidays are still plastered on the walls.

There’s something about London, and the London Neil Gaiman presents in Neverwhere, that makes it almost easy to believe that in London Below there are black friars at Blackfriars, an actual angel in Islington, shepherds in Shepherd’s Bush who you should hope you never have to meet, Coke and chocolates from platform vending machines are served if you are a guest at Earl’s Court, and you have to get to the floating market at Harrod’s (the previous one was in Big Ben – it floats from place to place) by crossing Night’s Bridge.

An Equal Music / Galatea 2.2

An Equal Music is worth the read if you love classical music or are a classical musician, and even more so if, like me, you just happen to be a lapsed violinist/pianist living in London with a hankering for Vienna.

Having said that, I should clarify that you may not necessarily like the book after you’ve read it. You may, for example, get completely pissed off with the “classical musician psyche”, which I identified with occasionally, but more often than not was slightly stupefied by. This is possibly one of the many reasons why I gave up classical music for debating, where people are just as dysfunctional but at least a little more rational.

One thing I did understand completely in the book was the protagonist’s devotion to his violin, not merely as an exceptionally sweetly singing member of its class of string instrument, but as a unique entity in itself – the feel of it under his chin, the bounce of light off its varnish. The smoothness of its neck under the skin of his thumb as he goes from first to fourth position. Force me to choose between slashing my arm with a knife or slashing my violin and I will unhesitatingly and willingly make myself bleed. The fact that it lies long-neglected and lonely in its case as I write this makes no difference to what I’ve just said, although it does make me feel painfully guilty.

Galatea 2.2 was fascinating, but less of an easy read. Again, it dealt with ideas I personally like reading about, so if you tend to be drawn to variations on the Pygmalion myth, artificial intelligence, academia, the passions of reading and trials of writing, then this one’s very much worth a try. I actually found it far more moving than An Equal Music, and found its characters (even the computer) decidedly more multi-faceted. Oh, I should add – apart from all the things listed above, it’s also about where life and love seep into cracks between the compartments, and why that ultimately makes it so difficult to learn the human condition without living it yourself.

The Sportswriter / Galapagos / Anil’s Ghost

More books, by the way:

Smoke And Mirrors and Angela’s Ashes, both of which I’ve been meaning to buy for the longest time.

A History Of Amnesia (Alfian Sa’at, one of my favourite Singaporean poets)

Ghostwritten (David Mitchell) and Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers) from the Marine Parade library, which is full of books I can’t find in the UCL library and is an exceedingly pleasant place to lose yourself in for a few hours. Or a week.

Had to zip through Anil’s Ghost and Galapagos in order to finish them by their due dates, after taking far too long to get through The Sportswriter due to the fact that it seemed to induce chronic narcolepsy. It’s not that it’s a bad book – the writing had its moments, and some parts were marginally poignant, but it just moved far too slowly and I never found myself able to like or understand the protagonist very much, such as when he suggested to his ex-wife that they go into a room and make passionate love in the house of his friend who’d just committed suicide. She wasn’t keen, and I don’t blame her. Perhaps it’s a very male book.

Galapagos started off feeling like classic Vonnegut, and I was expecting great things, which might have been why I was a little disappointed by the end of it. There were all these fascinating little tidbits of how life was to be on the Galapagos island of Santa Rosalia for his motley crew of apocalypse survivors, and I kept reading in eager anticipation of finding out more, but was never given it. He wraps the book up hastily, and the reader is left to make imaginatory leaps between years on the island. What was daily life like? Who was the first human with flippers? How long did it all take?

I realize that longing for details like that aren’t always what reading Vonnegut is about – a Vonnegut book almost wouldn’t be a Vonnegut book without fistfuls of misleadingly simply expressed ideas, liberally sprinkled across paper and time, with you as reader expected to hunt, gather, and interpret. Given that I loved Slaughterhouse 5, The Sirens Of Titan and Cat’s Cradle, this disappointment in Galapagos is hard for me to justify, since it doesn’t seem a lesser book than these. I guess at the end of it all, I just wanted something it whetted my appetite for but didn’t give me. I still love Kurt, though. He’s given me enough gems, and is allowed to be less than marvellous every now and then.

I enjoyed Anil’s Ghost, mostly because I’ve always liked Michael Ondaatje’s writing style – the introductory passage alone wouldn’t let me go until I’d read it three times – but also because its content appealed to me. Forensics, archaeology, politics, and the tragedies it can bring about; loss, courage and sacrifice, lives of quiet desperation. It’s not anywhere as lyrical, scenic or romantic as The English Patient, but there’s a subtle, unambitious beauty in this book that I found equally (though differently) moving.

Rick Astley Rut / Regeneration (Pat Barker)

(NoBloggerLove post 3: Friday 6 July)

Conversational snippet, which proves that Wednesday night’s clubbing ordeal was, at least, not all for naught:

Friend: Michelle, I just feel like I’m in a rut.
Me: _____, things could be worse. At least you weren’t dancing to Rick Astley on the platform at Mambo Night, for example.
Friend: You have a point. I feel better now.

* * *

(NoBloggerLove post 4: Saturday 7 July)

Regeneration is one of those books that makes me want to slap myself on the head after finishing it.

There’s a kind of seething frustration, a sort of “I can’t believe I spent all these years not having read Regeneration” sense of annoyed wonder at this book that I’ve deprived myself the pleasure of over a significant period of time, either through ignorance or apathy.

It happens occasionally enough to be just about right – any more frequently, and I’d worry about my ignorance; any less frequently, and I might start to miss that exciting feeling of making a find. It last happened some time in January, I think, when I heard Paul Simon’s Graceland for the first time, and again, there was this feeling, this vexation, that the rest of the world had spent years listening to Graceland, and I’d stupidly missed out.

If, like me, you like war poetry, especially Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and think the idea of being a fly on the wall in the hospital where they met and where Sassoon received “treatment” for his opposition to WWI is intriguing; if you enjoy subtle, intelligent writing somewhat in the vein of The Remains Of The Day, which is, in my opinion, a showcase of the art of saying just enough and no more, and if you haven’t read Regeneration (I don’t know about the other two books in the trilogy yet, but I’ll definitely get to them ASAP), then you might just be heading for a slap on the head.

Stardust (Neil Gaiman): Tangents

So there I was last night, brimming with domestic bliss from a successfully cooked dinner (peppery chicken with capsicum, carrots, onions and garlic stir-fried with hoi sin sauce and chilli. And rice with the fluffiness and fragrance that no one does better than Thailand), and I decided it would be a great thing to continue in achievement mode by getting a start on my property essay, due this Friday.

I was convinced of this all the way up the stairs to my room.

Then I came in, saw Stardust (thanks Vikram!) on the bed, and before I knew it I was happily snuggled under my duvet, propped up by Sheep cushion and hugging Butterfly cushion (thanks Esther!) with my warm honeyed lemon tea nearby, Kind Of Blue from the speakers, and the BT Tower with its top lost in clouds through my window.

I don’t know whether it’s just me and my Neil Gaiman obsession or that he really is damn good, but there’s something about his writing that always makes me feel the wonder I felt when I was six years old, and JRR Tolkien told me about an intricate, intriguing fantasy world populated with creatures that had always wandered the fringes of my imagination, but were always one-dimensional caricatures before Tolkien gave them language, culture, mythology, life.

My initial enchantment with fantasy didn’t really last. I love David Eddings (despite his self-plagiarising tendencies), but more because of his humour and the uncanny parallels between his world and ours than because he actually manages to unshackle me from reality. I appreciate the originality and humour of Terry Pratchett, but somehow reading his books always feels like there’s a list of obvious jokes and references you’re supposed to get, and I find myself exhausted within minutes of beginning. I ploughed through six of Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time tomes, and finally gave up when I realized I hated almost all the characters and couldn’t care less about their fate or the fate of their world. In general, most of what I pick up seems to be much of a muchness, and I usually find myself reading for the sake of getting through the book, rather than because I actually give a damn.

Neil Gaiman’s worlds are whimsical beauty with flashes of incredible morbidity. You can read his stories just for simple enjoyment, but if you explore the plethora of mythological, literary and cultural references he throws in, you’re amazed by the richness and diversity of the material from which he draws his inspiration: that amazing repository of the human imagination. The good part is that he doesn’t club you over the head with any of it – his writing style is infinitely accessible, and you almost don’t notice the craftsmanship that’s gone into it.

So that’s how I spent last night: body snuggled in bed, mind roaming the serewoods and skyharbours of Faerie.

Addendum: Reading over that again, I feel the need to say that I am not one of those strange types who swears she has gossamer wings and leaves bits of sugar around for her invisible fairy sisters. I only like Neil Gaiman’s fairies, and most of them look horrible and micro-demonic.