Summer Reading

The titles I have recently read deserve a bit more time and attention than I can give to them right now, but here's a quick overview of my reactions to what I've read lately.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: I suppose I should have read Infinite Jest first, but I never managed to get around to it.  The idea of a novel centering on the lives of IRS employees, though, just seemed too remarkable to pass up.  TPK may be an unfinished, posthumously published novel, but it still forthrightly presents the work of a visionary.  Of course, the final product here is somewhat uneven at times, a little messy, but in a way it's better like that: there's a fuzziness that surrounds things in a way that suits Wallace's style and tone.  The posthumously published unfinished novel ought to be a standard trope in the postmodern repertoire.

Two long chapters, in particular, stand out as tours de force.  The first depicts firsthand a conversion experience faced by an IRS employee, the moment when an oft-stoned self-described "wastoid" (who is also, you realize eventually, a savant with numbers) finds focus and vision in his life through a single lecture given by a substitute Jesuit tax accounting professor.  That vision is what soon leads him to the IRS.  The second depicts the barroom encounter between a very odd but also oddly talented auditor, who might be both autistic and in possession of a supernatural ability to levitate, and one of his co-workers, the office beauty who is heavily burdened with emotional baggage and has a long, drawn-out story to tell.  Suffice it to say that she knows a good target when she sees one: someone who will listen to the whole, slightly unreliable tale until it's all over. 

With this novel, Wallace gave us something that will have to be considered the postmodern equivalent of an epic, something expansive and vast that gets to the heart of weighty matters.  Instead of the Trojan War, we have tax return processing.  The contrast between the two is beyond anything James Joyce could have imagined. 

The Long Ships by Frans Bengstrom: I saw an ad for this in the New York Review of Books (it's an NYRB title), and I felt compelled to acquire a copy.  Here's a novel, originally published in Swedish in 1940, that is, quite simply, a classic adventure that could be enjoyed equally by a 10-year-old, a 40-year-old, or an 80-year-old.  TLS tells the life story of Red Orm, a Viking from the late 10th/early 11th centuries, and the prose -- simple and direct -- reads like Tolkien without all of the supernatural stuff.  There's an airy current of playful irony that runs through the novel, and the pace of the narrative is brisk and jaunty.  Orm lives the life of a slave and then that of a great lord and chieftain.  He travels from Scandinavia to Spain, to Ireland and England, back home again, then eventually to a final adventure in the rough terrains of central Europe.  His fortunes are good, overall, and despite his rough and oft-violent inclinations, we recognize that what makes him a hero is, more than his strength or his prowess with arms, his basic human decency -- his sense of fairness and his willingness to give others their due, qualities that get drawn out perhaps a bit further when he converts to Christianity, but which were already with him before that.  Orm catches the world on the cusp, at a moment when it begins to transform from something alien to us to something that, if not recognizably modern, at least bears the earliest seeds of something modern.  A fantastic read -- fun and entertaining but not insulting to the intelligence. 

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: I happened to be reading this in the midst of a trek through Mormon country.  As my wife drove, I looked up between pages to gaze at the mirages of the Great Salt Lake Desert, mountains floating on waves of heat off in the distance.  I had never been curious about Mormonism before, but now I find myself fascinated and, to be honest, somewhat appalled.  Although most Mormons are not, I suspect, any more outlandish than mainstream Christians, there are some deeply ingrained issues in the LDS church that I find disturbing: the blatant racism and sexism, the history of deception and the unwillingness to face facts about church history, and the reluctance to acknowledge a separation between church and state, in particular.  Krakauer's prose is not brilliant, but it's always clear and compelling.  He ranges far and wide, as usual, in sourcing background information, drawing on Wallace Stegner, Harold Bloom, and others, including a lot of Mormon historians and even Joseph Smith himself.  What he really gets at here is an examination of the differences between those who seek after/those who believe in revelations and those who don't.  He follows through on the ramifications of what it means to believe in personal revelation, and in doing so manages (despite his attempts at fairmindedness) to make a pretty solid case for the potentially catastrophic discrepency between such belief and the values of a modern secular society.

Open City by Teju Cole: The idea of the book sold me on it: a young professional wanders through New York on foot in his spare time, commenting on what he sees.  I am an avid walker myself, and I sense in Cole's narrator something of a kindred spirit, though on the surface I don't seem to bear much in common with Julius, a young and unattached psychiatrist from Nigeria.  Walkers are all alike, though, in that we value: seeing and experiencing the new, and revisioning and rediscovering the familiar.  Cole's novel successfully evokes what the habitual walker always seeks to achieve: a simultaneous connection to and distance from one's environs.  The walker is always an observer and disdains participation, unless it be that most banal of interactions: the casual but revealing sidewalk conversation with someone you just happen to run into, of which there are many in this novel.

Early on, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that the course of the novel will be as aimless as Julius' wanderings, but patterns soon emerge.  Julius' many asides on history, art, and literature sometimes begin to verge on the stale prose quality of a typical Wikipedia entry, but Cole always turns them around by the end, and they end up providing useful insights into Julius' character.  Eventually, we see what Julius is reluctant to admit or perhaps does not himself realize: that he is, if not misanthropic, at least anti-social to some significant degree.  He lives too much in his head.  He keeps people, most people, at a distance, and thus emerges as the archetypal inhabitant of the modern open city.