the Richard Larson blog

Review of House of Windows and Slights

My review of John Langan's House of Windows and Kaaron Warren's Slights, two solid debut horror novels, is now up at Strange Horizons.

Writing New Things:

When it became clear to me I might finish my first novel I was already thinking that I wanted my second one to be as different as possible from my first. Then I wanted my third to be as different as possible from my second. Mainly because— not because of ambition— I just didn't like the idea of always writing the same novel. There are authors I love who always write the same novel, like Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. I mean they might not feel that way, Hemingway might have been like, what are you talking about? But from an aesthetic point of view, he was writing the same book over and over. It would drive me insane. It would be like an obsessive person at an asylum darning the same sock.

-- John Wray, on the experience of writing Lowboy

Kakutani on Chronic City

From Michiko Kakutani's review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City:

“The Fortress of Solitude” demonstrated that the gifted Mr. Lethem did not need to rely on the postmodernist pyrotechnics and cutesy special effects that had animated much of his earlier work, and that when he dispensed with these framing techniques, he could write vividly and movingly about regular people — about fathers and sons, about friends who grow apart, about people trying to grapple with the thorny issues of race and class and social change.

Is this a jab at Lethem's earlier science fiction works? Is Kakutani saying that the use of genre is a "cutesy special effect" and the only fiction worth reading is literary realism about "regular people"? If so, she's missing out on some of Lethem's most interesting work, and indeed some of the most interesting work being produced by "literary" authors today. Lame, Michiko: lame. (Which, incidentally, is a word she uses herself to deliver one final blow to Lethem's novel at the end of her snide and unhelpful review.)

Sigrid Undset's The Bridal Wreath

In the first volume of her series of novels based on her character Kristin Lavrandsdatter, Sigrid Undset's The Bridal Wreath, there is a preoccupation with the supernatural as representative of the unknown, apparently a terrifying concept to residents of fourteenth-century Norway: a fear of "uncanny things that are stirring" in strange, foreign places -- "forest beasts," etc -- almost comes to represent a fear of ungodliness (p. 10). When Kristin first goes on a journey with her father into parts unknown, she gazes "with great eyes -- never before had she dreamed that the world was so big and wide" (p. 11). There is a sense of Christianity as set up against the supernatural: Kristin suspects that "under every stone there dwelt trolls and goblins and elfin-folk, and she was afraid, for no one knew the number of them -- but there must be many times more of them than of Christian men and women" (p. 12).

This is all established very early in the novel, and the supernatural comes into play more subtly later on, except in the case of Lady Aashild, a "witch-wife" who uses magic to (apprently) lure men to her (p. 37). People in the parish feared her; she appears, over time, not to age. Yet when they need her, they call on her, and she comes, especially when Kristin's younger sister's health is severely threatened. She figures prominently in the novel's concluding pages as she proves complicit in the death by poison of Kristin's betrothed's former paramour, allowing for Kristin's union with Erlend but not by deceitful means; she is seen, rather, as being swept up in plots which she does not support. Throughout the novel, godliness is seen as an eternal struggle, a pact which can be broken so easily and carelessly -- and to great shame. Thus, people tend to sin in private, and much drama is made of their attempts, often futile, to keep secrets. While much is made of Kristin's betrothed's prior sinfulness, having produced two children out of wedlock, the novel's conclusion involves Kristin's own mother confessing to her husband that she, too, has sinned in a similar way.

Thus there is indeed an invisible veil that each character must pull over their most shameful selves to hide them from God, yes, but also from each other; "such sins as these -- it may be that God may forgive such sins more easily than many others -- but they lay waste a kindred in such wise that it can never be made whole again" (p. 187). It is their relationships with each other, ultimately, that these characters cherish most. Godliness is equated to human goodness in problematic ways that refuse to allow for mistakes, which otherwise could be forgiven. Religion becomes a trap from which these characters have very little hope of escape. Sins against God involve sins against other people; Kristin notes that "Much have I done already that I deemed once I dared not do because 'twas sin. But I saw not till now what sin brings with it -- that we must tread others underfoot" (p. 214). Eventually it takes vaguely supernatural weather conditions to bring all of these personal dramas to light, but they do indeed spill forth, and we come to see that it is to each other, rather than God, that these characters feel most closely bound. We must eventually face those who we have tread underfoot and bear, for all to see, the "hideous deformity of sin" (p. 260).

The city, the self, and the past:

I'm convinced that no one writes the city better than Orhan Pamuk. Except maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald in certain beautiful passages from The Great Gatsby.

A Pamuk quote, from Istanbul:

Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorous and Istanbul's dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A good many writers of earlier generations fell into this habit when writing about Istanbul: Even as they extol the city's beauty, entrancing me with their stories, I am reminded they no longer live in the place they describe, preferring the modern comforts of western cities. From these predecessors I learned that the right to heap immoderate lyrical praise on Istanbul's beauties belongs only to those who no longer live there, and not without some guilt: for the writer who talks of the city's ruins and melancholy is never unaware of the ghostly light that shines down on his life. To be caught up in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorous is to be reminded of the difference between one's own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past.

Faith and the Natural World

The idea in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop of the land of the American southwest as a rugged "blank slate" of a terrain, a dangerous and foreign place that must be tamed, is ever present and provides much of the purpose for the the novel's protagonist, Father Latour, as he negotiates a life for himself outside of his native France as a Catholic missionary. In a beautiful passage towards the end of the novel, we bear witness to his decision to forego a peaceful death in Paris and instead come back to America, "to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!" Latour has fallen in love with the "wind that made one a boy again." And the terrain, tellingly, is a desert, while Latour himself is a gardener, made to "plant where another shall reap" -- quoted from dialogue of Father Joseph Vaillant, Father Latour's closest friend and confidante, but the idea still applies. (Later, the maintenance of his garden is referred to as Latour's "only recreation.")

While there is the continued sense of the desert people (Mexicans and native Americans alike) as "not more than half human," at least in certain incidences (specifically Father Vaillant's rant in which he likens Mexicans to children, always in need of guidance), it is the transformation of the land itself that is the most apt metaphor here for evangelism. While it is the people who are being changed, the land describes the mission of Catholicism in uncharted territories as nearly impossible, almost as impossible as making vegetation flourish in a desert. "The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape" -- indeed. There is "something reptilian" about this part of the world, "something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like the crustaceans in their armour." When Latour is depressed about the future, Cather uses language like "His soul had become a barren field"  which clearly refers back to the central metaphor of planting, of spreading the "seed" of Catholicism. There is the sense that Christianity will save the world, and the setting of the American southwest, a barren, dangerous, and thirsty landscape, is perfect for the success of this consistent imagery.

Precious?

Ed Gonzalez at Slant Magazine:

Precious might have been passable if not for these slick, fatuously filmed sequences—visions of its main character dancing, singing on stages, and walking down red carpets with a light-black-skinned hottie, even seeing herself in the mirror as a white girl—that only succeed at simplifying its young protagonist's feelings of insecurity and yearning for escape, as well as highlighting Daniels's contrived thoughts on cause and effect. At Each One Teach One, where Precious is sent after it's discovered that she's pregnant, images of African-African political chutzpah and attainment, including a speech by Malcolm X, are green-screened onto window blinds and chalkboards. This is after a trip to a museum and schoolwork that involves nothing deeper than writing letters of the alphabet on the chalkboard. So, between Precious and An Education, Lone Scherfig's horrid BBC Afterschool Special, we now have the official theme of the upcoming Oscar season: the uplift of the races and sexes through higher learning.

If this movie by the director of the insipid Shadowboxer, which I had the unfortunate opportunity to work publicity events for during its New York release a few years ago, is anything as arrogantly presumptuous and shameless as An Education, I have absolutely no interest. Which begs the question: which films identified early by general critical concensus as Oscar contenders for this year are actually any good?

Honorable!

My story, "Good Night," which appeared last year in ChiZine, has received an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year. Nadia Bulkin's phenomenal "Intertropical Convergence Zone," which appeared in the same issue of ChiZine as my story, made the shortlist, and I'm very fond of many authors whose stories will be included in the book, especially Rick Bowes with "If Angels Fight" and Margo Lanagan with "The Goosle." Promises to be an amazing volume.

Modernity, London, and Abstraction

When Foucault wrote that the "attitude of modernity" is "a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task," he is essentially indicating that participation in modernity requires a certain level of agency. We are not all, he would say, modern, just by living in a certain time or place. But the modern, also, is inherently contingent to certain times and places -- the city, for example, at the turn of the 20th century -- and so the idea of "belonging" is made problematic by external forces, even as Georg Simmel alludes to the "uncomfortable freedom of the metropolis" (James Donald's quote in Imagining the Modern City) because of the idea that, in small towns, "frequent and prolonged association assures the personality of an unambiguous image of himself in the eyes of the other" (Simmel). Thus, the city offers anonymity, but only if one desires it; if one is willing to participate in modernity. And if modernity is simply a state of mind, as Robert Park argues, then the city itself is called into question: what is it, then, but a collection of people choosing to live life in a particular way?

James Donald provides a system of identification involving abstraction, representation, and imagination, all of which amounts to a discussion of outer vs. inner life within an individual. Donald imagines Simmel himself asking "how ... does the outside of the metropolis become the inside of mental life?" The result of all of this is the idea of an unreal city, a place which exists largely in the imagination and is ultimately a different place for everyone.

But fiction writers who have written about the modern city explicate these individual points of view more concretely -- such as Dickens with Bleak House, as he uses the accumulation of detail in a way which provides a way in which to view and understand the city, a way to position London as a real place even as it is experienced in a multitude of ways. The reality becomes evidence for its unreality. Even as the city is a legible text for Dickens, as a fiction writer he is only able to convey a single point of view, just as W.R. Burnett, in The Asphalt Jungle, utilizes the tools of popular fiction to imagine a city empty, alien, essentially mechanistic, inhuman, if only to set the stage for an examination into the criminal outer fringe of civilization. And, of course, Flaubert, with his Emma Bovary always striving for an existence in a city (Paris) which seems largely imaginary.

In "The City of Dreadful Night," an essay by Peter Hall, the failure of London's ruling bodies to effectively identify and solve the problems of the extremely poor working class in the mid-to-late 19th century becomes an odyssey into a crisis of identification. Hall seems unable to draw a line between the residents of London's slums and the wealthy ruling class, revealing an extreme gap in identification, poring over a number of attempts on the part of the government to solve the poverty problem while ultimately indicating the impossibility, metaphorically, of understanding a foreign language, which seems to be what the class divide amounted to. Andrew Mearns, with The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, brought to light the problem of poverty in extreme terms; an anecdote about his questioning of a 12-year-old girl about who is taking care of her, since her parents are gone, and her reply of "I look after my little brothers and sisters as well as I can," is particularly heartbreaking. But the sympathy derived from the text on the part of the British Roal Commission, appointed to observe the nature of the poverty problem, ultimately produced "no unanimous conclusion as to remedy" (Hall).

It seems to me that this is a result of modernity's complicated system of abstraction and representation, not to mention imagination. If the ruling class of London could understand the plight of the poor in ways beyond abstraction, perhaps results would have been more readily come by. But even this argument is inherently abstract, applying theory to speculations about decision-making where no relationship has been concretely established. I guess I'm ultimately trying to come to terms with the frivolity of urban theories which seem particularly hewed towards a culture of luxury and opportunity and the more severe depictions of the modern city when it comes to the slums, the class cast aside to allow for modernity's privileged concerns of "the personality" (Simmel) --  for what do we ultimately make of those whom the translation of representational spaces "within which a mass of transitory fleeting and fortuitous interactions take place" do not necessarily congeal into a "state of mind" (Donald) but, rather, the failure of a particular way of life?

An Education

Lone Scherfig's An Education was completely stupid, redundant, unnecessary, and embarrassing. Stylish and with decent performances but completely without substance and in possession of absolutely zero personality. Stupid, stupid, stupid female characters, and really, isn't the whole thing supposed to be about women? Why should I care that the women in this movie are lied to, abused, and forced to suffer for the sake of others if they're all so ridiculously annoying? I could go on, but I'd rather go listen to a Celine Dion album, write bad poetry about my high school English teacher, and cut myself.