A tough slog and not always worth the effort, Chuck Palahniuk's Rant is an ambitious and unconventional novel that touches on time travel, philosophy, disease, recreational car crashes, and civil liberties.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
Files on Parade and Other Stories
John O'Hara's skill with dialogue is such that several of these stories come alive in the reader's mind as staged scenes from plays. Others, like the Pal Joey letters, are so original and revealing that they could form a timeless primer on human behavior.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Submission
My review of Submission, published in the Tampa Bay Times:
Not with a bang, but with a ballot.
That is how France comes under Islamic rule in the near future in French novelist Michel Houellebecq's challenging and sobering novel. Challenging because it presents a welter of ideas, including a short course in French literature and philosophy. Sobering not so much because of the takeover itself but because of the Western decay — suicide, really — that allows it to happen.
Submission serves as a warning to the comfortable and self-satisfied West that individual liberties and secular governments can have expiration dates. It's 2017, and the politically savvy Mohammed Ben Abbes has formed the Muslim Brotherhood with a focus on charity, youth groups and "family values." It takes off, and by 2022 a tipping point arrives.
As Houellebecq's narrator says: "It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay."
The narrator is Francois, a middle-aged Paris literature professor with no lasting attachments, little interest in politics and a fascination with the 19th century writer J.K. Huysmans, the subject of his dissertation. Mired in a series of unsatisfactory relationships with students and prostitutes, Francois may be standing in for an entire civilization when he asks, "Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature." He views the rise of the Brotherhood with bemused detachment until it becomes clear that an Islamic government will directly affect his teaching position.
Where other authors might have loaded this tale with violence and political caricature, Houellebecq sticks to ideas and intimate relationships. Gunshots pop, but only in the background.
In fact, the Islamic party's rise seems so effortless that it becomes at times hard to swallow, even as fiction. Would France really submit to women being excluded from secondary education? Or requiring professors to convert to Islam? In the novel, women leave the workforce in droves in favor of a generous family subsidy, driving down the unemployment rate.
There is a kind of demographic determinism at work that can seem too trite, as when Francois defends the patriarchal societies of old: "There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren't enough children, so we're finished."
Houellebecq's relationship with Islam is fraught. In his 2000 novel, Lanzarote, a narrator who is looking for a place to vacation says, "Arab countries might be worth the effort … if we could just liberate them from their absurd religion." In Submission, Francois takes a more accommodating approach. Houellebecq himself is quoted as saying the novel is not Islamophobic but a social commentary.
As usual, the author's winning prose is studded with bitter wit and imagery, as when a former lover who has aged poorly is likened to "a bird in an oil slick" who "had retained, if I can put it this way, a superior ability to flap her wings." When Francois leaves Paris to escape potential unrest, he goes to the southwest. "I knew next to nothing about the southwest, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war." When he gets back to Paris, all the women are in pants.
"If Islam is not political, it is nothing," according to Ayatollah Khomeini, who is quoted at the beginning of the novel's final section. Where Houellebecq runs with that idea will leave many readers fascinated and alarmed.
Not with a bang, but with a ballot.
That is how France comes under Islamic rule in the near future in French novelist Michel Houellebecq's challenging and sobering novel. Challenging because it presents a welter of ideas, including a short course in French literature and philosophy. Sobering not so much because of the takeover itself but because of the Western decay — suicide, really — that allows it to happen.
Submission serves as a warning to the comfortable and self-satisfied West that individual liberties and secular governments can have expiration dates. It's 2017, and the politically savvy Mohammed Ben Abbes has formed the Muslim Brotherhood with a focus on charity, youth groups and "family values." It takes off, and by 2022 a tipping point arrives.
As Houellebecq's narrator says: "It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay."
The narrator is Francois, a middle-aged Paris literature professor with no lasting attachments, little interest in politics and a fascination with the 19th century writer J.K. Huysmans, the subject of his dissertation. Mired in a series of unsatisfactory relationships with students and prostitutes, Francois may be standing in for an entire civilization when he asks, "Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature." He views the rise of the Brotherhood with bemused detachment until it becomes clear that an Islamic government will directly affect his teaching position.
Where other authors might have loaded this tale with violence and political caricature, Houellebecq sticks to ideas and intimate relationships. Gunshots pop, but only in the background.
In fact, the Islamic party's rise seems so effortless that it becomes at times hard to swallow, even as fiction. Would France really submit to women being excluded from secondary education? Or requiring professors to convert to Islam? In the novel, women leave the workforce in droves in favor of a generous family subsidy, driving down the unemployment rate.
There is a kind of demographic determinism at work that can seem too trite, as when Francois defends the patriarchal societies of old: "There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren't enough children, so we're finished."
Houellebecq's relationship with Islam is fraught. In his 2000 novel, Lanzarote, a narrator who is looking for a place to vacation says, "Arab countries might be worth the effort … if we could just liberate them from their absurd religion." In Submission, Francois takes a more accommodating approach. Houellebecq himself is quoted as saying the novel is not Islamophobic but a social commentary.
As usual, the author's winning prose is studded with bitter wit and imagery, as when a former lover who has aged poorly is likened to "a bird in an oil slick" who "had retained, if I can put it this way, a superior ability to flap her wings." When Francois leaves Paris to escape potential unrest, he goes to the southwest. "I knew next to nothing about the southwest, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war." When he gets back to Paris, all the women are in pants.
"If Islam is not political, it is nothing," according to Ayatollah Khomeini, who is quoted at the beginning of the novel's final section. Where Houellebecq runs with that idea will leave many readers fascinated and alarmed.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
The Chrysanthemum Palace
More self-consciously literary than some of his gonzo-style works, this Hollywood novel by Bruce Wagner is the story of three offspring of show business and literary "royalty" and their struggle to live up to, or erase, the parental mark. The characterizations fail to achieve great depth, but the prose is impeccable.
Girl, 20
Kingsley Amis's 1971 novel is an artifact of its time, with mod swinging London at center stage, but it holds up as an examination of flawed humans, leavened with satisfying wit.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
The End of the Affair
For all the agonized fussiness and appeal to higher ideals contained in this novel, Greene's conception of the origin of the love affair is something a 5-year-old would recognize: "I'm in love." "Me too." There is nothing written either before or after these lines to make them remotely credible. On such a false foundation, the rest of the work teeters.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
The Big Laugh
On the back of my 1963 Bantam paperback of John O'Hara's The Big Laugh, a blurb calls him "America's most powerful novelist." Hemingway and Faulkner were dead, Dos Passos had moved on to other forms, and the generation of Mailer, Updike and others hadn't yet moved up to take their place. That leaves O'Hara, who was dismissed by many critics but whose books always sold well. The Big Laugh is a Hollywood novel with the O'Hara earmarks: long passages of pitch-perfect dialogue, a preoccupation with status and its markers, and crumbling relationships. O'Hara is nothing if not powerful, but who could hold that title today, in a landscape full of pipsqueaks like Jonathan Franzen?
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Toujours Provence
This one is every bit as enjoyable as Peter Mayle's first run at the subject, A Year in Provence, with chapters on truffles, pastis, and Pavarotti.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
The Empty Chair
Most of the pleasure in The Empty Chair, a volume of two novellas by Bruce Wagner centered on gurus and the search for enlightenment, comes from the author's electric prose.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Arts and Sciences
Thomas Mallon's first novel captures the mood and culture of the early 1970s and presents a passable love story in an academic setting.
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