pileofgreybooks: a book ring

This novel, by Michel Houellebecq, is very French. It's French in the way that Nausea by John-Paul Satre and Camus' L'etranger are French. In other words, it's as much of a philosophical treatise as it is a novel and that's something American authors don't really do. This novel caused quite a stir when it came out a few years back because it was Houellebecq's first (an incredible accomplishment) and because it's shockingly frank and cynical about sex and the decline of Western civilisation. The book is full of descriptions of rather tawdry, pathetic sex acts but it's a highly serious book, one that posits that Western society has basically played out its current state of evolution and that we're ripe for a "metaphysical mutation." In the world of the book, this comes in the form of an imagined future which I won't give away, but which has to do with genetic engineering.

It's hard to describe the effect of this book, and harder still to pin down its philosophical claims (given all of its meta-fictional conceits). If you tend to think that the world is pretty much set up in a generally positive way and that most people lead reasonably happy lives (or at least have the potential to lead them), this book is likely to temporarily destroy those assumptions. It is umremittingly pessimistic about the current state of our world, but ultimately weirdly dedicated to the beauty of the human soul.

I realise that I haven't really told you much about the book. It follows two French brothers, one a sex-obsessed schoolteacher and one an emotionally cold molecular biologist. Their lives intertwine and Houellebecq dissects late capitalist-materialist society, focuisng primarily on our drive for sexual pleasure and spiritual fulfillment. You may not end up becoming a disciple of Houellebecq's worldview but you will end up having a lot of your standard preconceptions tossed on their heads, which can only a good thing, right?

This is the classic story of the seafarer’s wife perched on her widow’s walk, looking out onto the sea, waiting for her Odysseus to sail over the horizon. It is the story of Clare the time traveler’s wife waiting for Henry, her husband, to return. Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder—a condition that causes him, through uncontrollable epileptic fits, to time travel. When Henry time travels he wakes up naked, hungry and confused having to resort to crime and thuggery in order to survive (an older Henry teaches a younger Henry how to pick pockets and locks—he has several outstanding warrants with the Chicago police).
Through the “wonders” of time travel Clare grows up with Henry, meeting him in secret in a meadow behind her childhood home, but Henry doesn’t meet her till he is older. His younger life is spent falling apart, searching for oblivion in alcoholism and meaningless sex. Clare loves Henry and becomes his anchor—I know, it sounds kind of sappy, but the writer pulls it off without overdoing the sentimental factor. I liked the book’s honesty and how the Author managed to keep the whole plot from unraveling under the weight of its crazy twists and turns.

A totally different kind of first-person narrative is offered in Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library. Hollinghurst, an English novelist, has been relegated to the "gay fiction" shelves until this year when he finally crossed over and won the Booker for The Line of Beauty. This novel is his first and it is masterful, incredibly engrossing and written in an arch, richly embroidered prose that's sort of a sexier version of Henry James. The subject is sex and there's lots of it described in this book -- random sex with men that the narrator picks up in clubs and trains and lavatories. It's pretty hot, but also psychologically astute. Our narrator is a beautiful English aristocrat in his mid-twenties in 1980s London, who lives off family money and spends his days working out and indolently satisfying his carnal desires. Along with his own sexual escapades, the book recounts his interactions with an 80-year old eccentric gay noble who adopts the young man as his prospective biographer. The stories of these two men's lives start to intertwine beautifully and Hollinghurst offers a melancholy, bittersweet portrait of homosexual culture throughout the 20th Century, existing on the margins both because of societal stigma and individual preference. It explores the beauty and the pain inherent in both men's desires and their dissatisfactions. It's an incredibly accomplished piece of writing that unfortunately ends rather perfunctorially when one wishes that the story would just go on and on. Hollinghurst has a hynotic way of telling his story, jumping from bit to bit and giving us just what we need. He doesn't underline obvious parallels or motives in a scenario (old man passing his traditions on to younger man) that could come off as sentimental. The book is elegant and erotic in the truest sense .

First of all, I want to thank Tom and Jess for inviting me to join this book ring. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer this year and is really worth reading, a novel that starts out deceptively simply and turns out to be very hard to pin down or to wrap your head around. It's told in the first person by an elderly Midewestern preacher approaching death and writing a letter to his young son, ostensibly to offer him worldly wisdom. The subjects covered include several generations in the life of the family, a family in which fathers and sons have all been preachers. The action travels back as far as the "Bloody Kansas" days leading up to the Civil War. At first, the narrator's tone seems downright treacly and, indeed, preachy and there are platitudes every other paragraph. Slowly, though, one realizes that Robinson is up to something: the preacher's certainty is breaking down and he may have been deceiving himself about a lot of things in his life. The book continually surprises the reader and, after the first 60 pages or so, really picks up. This is a book that is set among people for whom religion is woven into the fabric of life and Bibical narratives (especially those of the patriarchs and the parable of the pordigal son) are woven into the language of the book. The subject is religion, but approached in an incredibly sophisticated, challenging way. It asks whether devotion to religion can be squared with being a fully engaged, thinking, ethical human being and it doesn't provide easy answers. It has a tircky narrative structure that asks whether true wisdom can indeed be realted through sermons or indeed words at all. Despite it's short length, this is a very sophisticated and intricate novel -- the Pulitzer committee did a good job!

I picked this book up after slogging half way through Pete Hamill’s thoroughly disappointing Valentine to Manhattan Forever (he should have saved us the trouble and mailed a heart shaped box of chocolates)
Anyhow
This book concerns an aging beekeeping Sherlock Holmes in 1944 on the case of a missing parrot and a murder, but mostly on the case of the parrot. It is good, but (I think) too short. Just when it got good it was over. Chabon builds such beautiful, intriguing scenes that I wanted him to stretch out and to enjoy, but they came and went and then the book ended.
But it is still worth the read—a summer afternoons investigation into the insanity of the human condition.