Committed

Gilbert, Elizabeth.  Committed: A Love Story.  New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

[E]very intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

- Elizabeth Gilbert

*~*~*

As lovely and introspective and redemptive as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love proved to be, I regret my need to say that the novel that follows, Committed, is shallow both by comparison and in its own right.  In Committed, Gilbert grapples with her reluctance to remarry following a devastating divorce, a reluctance she is forced to confront when her Brazilian boyfriend, Felipe, is deported from the U.S. and denied further entry unless he can obtain a visa through marriage to an American citizen.  While traveling abroad and waiting for Felipe’s immigration papers to be processed, Gilbert seeks to understand and define marriage, hoping to discover or create a version of matrimony that both guarantees her independence as a woman and satisfies her family and U.S. officials.  The book that emerges from this journey, however, seems more like Gilbert’s publisher’s attempt to capitalize on the success of Eat, Pray, Love than a genuine exploration of marital commitment.

Gilbert acknowledges early on that she cannot begin to tackle the concept of marriage as fully and deeply as she would like.  What she produces, though, does not even approach an attempt.  She asks a few Vietnamese women to relay their tales of how they got married.  She expresses reservations about becoming part of a tradition that has historically been used to deprive women of their property, money, and rights.  She asks if pledging eternal love and exchanging rings in the privacy of a hotel room constitutes a spiritual, if not a legal, marriage.  Mostly, though, she discusses Felipe’s restlessness and her anxiety during their eight months of expatriation.  The novel essentially describes a long waiting period, and we, as readers, feel as though we wait with them as we read.

Committed, then, emerges as a jerky, superficial discussion of marriage rather than a true exploration of matrimonial bonds.  Reading this book feels like waiting in an airport for a long overdue flight.  My recommendation is to read Eat, Pray, Love — even though the conclusion deprives us of the satisfaction of a wedding — and to skip Committed, for the self-indulgence of the former novel is far preferable to the expedient composition of the latter.

The Fifth Mountain

Coelho, Paulo. The Fifth Mountain. Trans. Clifford E. Landers. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.

From heaven, God smiles contentedly, for it was this that He desired, that each person take into his hands the responsibility for his own life.  For, in the final analysis, He had given His children the greatest of all gifts: the capacity to choose and determine their acts.

*~*~*

In The Fifth Mountain, Paulo Coelho retells and expands the Old Testament story of the Israelite prophet Elijah.  The original tale, which appears in 1 Kings, describes the tyranny of the Phoenician queen Jezebel, who, upon marrying Ahab, king of Israel, imposed her polytheistic faith upon her adopted country.  All Israelite prophets and those who refused conversion were put to death, save Elijah, who, under the protection of God and His angels, managed to escape to Phoenicia.  There a widow cared for him, until it was time for him to demonstrate the power of the one, true God to the unbelievers.  Coelho’s story embraces all of these elements while simultaneously infusing the old tale with an interesting perspective on suffering and divine will.

The Elijah of The Fifth Mountain is visited by a guardian angel throughout his childhood.  He thus knows he is a prophet; however, the lonely and painful lifestyle of the self-flagellating prophets he sees in town frightens him, and he is glad when the visitations cease.  Later, though, an angel of the Lord comes to him, ordering him to deliver a message to Ahab and Jezebel, and when the monarchs respond less than kindly to Elijah’s prediction of sustained drought, he similarly follows the angel’s command to abandon Israel for Phoenicia. 

I have often wondered how one distinguished between prophecy and lunacy in biblical times.  I suppose it all depended on the outcome of a given situation.  If a far-fetched prediction came to fruition, the speaker was a prophet and his tale entered national lore; if it didn’t, the prophet was scorned and forgotten.  Coelho’s Elijah never doubts his sanity; he does, however, find it difficult to interpret and enact God’s often vague commands.  He knows he must go to Phoenicia and eventually return to Israel.  But why the wait?  Why does God withdraw Elijah’s ability to conduct miracles after raising just one person from the dead?  Why does God allow the hospitable widow, whom Elijah grows to love, to die amidst the burning rubble of her home?  Elijah commits himself to doing God’s will, but when that will is unclear, or when it permits extensive and seemingly purposeless suffering, what is the prophet to do?

After much suffering, struggling, and contemplation, Elijah realizes that all things God wills and permits — exile, invasion, death — are encapsulated in a single, existential question: “What is the meaning of thy struggle?”  Through his pain and confusion, the prophet learns to view suffering as an ongoing challenge that requires him to cultivate the best in himself — his emotional perseverence, his intellectual strength, his physical drive.  God presents us with lives of suffering so that we may better ourselves through struggle, so that we may think and grow and choose how to move forward, improving our judgment and ability in the process.  In blindly following God’s commands, Elijah “had acted in the selfsame way as those who at no time in their lives had ever made an important decision;” he later comes to understand that the Lord “had led him to the abyss of the unavoidable” in order “to show him that man must choose — and not accept — his fate.”  Thus suffering becomes a sign of the Lord’s generosity, for in presenting us with conflict and loss, God provides an opportunity for us to fulfill His will with intellect, feeling, and conviction.  In undergoing this process, Elijah progresses from blind faith to deliberate faith, and though his doubts and questions initially appear rebellious, he discovers that what he “thought was a challenge to God was, in truth, his reencounter with Him.”

I appreciate Coelho’s nimble unwinding of this complicated and controversial message — controversial in that such an argument could be used to justify suffering and deemphasize compassion.  However, Elijah’s experiences, though they strengthen him, do not harden him.  After reaching this deeper understanding of God’s intent, Elijah inspires the survivors of an Assyrian invasion to gather and grow food, to learn to write, and to rebuild their city.  He challenges them, as God challenged him, but he never abandons them.

Interestingly, while the Old Testament ends Elijah’s time on earth with his bodily assumption into heaven, The Fifth Mountain leaves Elijah mid-story, among the people he helped to restore, a human prophet in a human world.  The novel therefore remains relateable, and the intellectual challenge it presents appears doable.  Those up for a challenge should read this novel — not because I say so, but because you choose so.

Eat, Pray, Love

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

I keep remembering my Guru’s teachings about happiness.  She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough.  But that’s not how happiness works.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.  You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel the world looking for it.  You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.

- Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love

*~*~*

Had I not run across a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert‘s Eat, Pray, Love selling for fifty cents at a rummage sale that otherwise featured only children’s clothing and ugly quilts, I wouldn’t have bothered to read it.  I rented the movie last year and found it disjointed and sappy, largely because I find it impossible to feel sorry for Julia Roberts under any circumstances.  However, the memoir itself pleasantly surprised me.  Its sustained emphasis on spirituality and selfhood nicely bind the three-part account of Gilbert’s efforts to find happiness and balance in three different countries.

In her early thirties, Gilbert had a lucrative and successful writing career.  She was married, owned and home, and she and her husband were trying to have a baby.  Nonetheless, she was deeply unhappy.  After nights of crying in her bathroom to the point of exhaustion, after uncharacteristic and exasperated prayer, Gilbert gradually and painfully accepted that this life, her life, wasn’t what she wanted.  She realized that “it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection,” and she therefore discarded the imitation of her married life in favor of discovering her own individual destiny.

Of course, Gilbert’s divorce and a subsequent whirlwind relationship left her so drained and disoriented that she barely knew where to start.  Nonetheless, she gave herself a year to find her bearings.  After depositing the advance for Eat, Pray, Love in her recently depleted bank account, Gilbert moved to Italy for four months, where she made friends, learned Italian, and indulged in cappuccino, pizza, and pastries.  She regained the weight she had lost during her prolonged divorce; she allowed herself to experience pleasure that had nothing to do with men.  Next, she spent four months at an ashram in India, where, through meditation and with the help of a new friend, she began to forgive herself, forgive her exes, and look forward with wonder rather than back with longing, confusion and need.  She spent the final leg of her journey in Bali, passing her afternoons with an old medicine man, befriending a healer, and, after much conversation and careful consideration, rediscovering love with an older Brazilian man who adores her.

The book’s too-perfect ending — divorcee finds love with affectionate man willing to cross continents for her! — may induce some eye-rolling, but Eat, Pray, Love is hardly a how-to guide for landing an amazing boyfriend.  Rather, it is a chronicle of deliberate, sometimes excruciating introspection which can, when endured and fully accepted, lead to a self-awareness that in turn makes sublime happiness possible.  Gilbert’s travels are spiritual as well as physical, and even I was glad to forget Julia Roberts and enjoy Gilbert’s journey with her.

Esau and Jacob

Machado de Assis, Joachim Maria. Esau and Jacob. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000.

Wit, good will, curiosity, call it what you will, there is a force that drags out here everything that people try to hide.  Secrets themselves get tired of remaining silent — silent or sleeping.  Let us keep that other verb, which serves the image better.  They get tired, and they help in their own fashion what we attribute to the indiscretion of others.

- from Machado de Assis’s Esau and Jacob

*~*~*

This novel’s heavy title caused me to expect a story of biblical proportions — something stormy, something epic.  I expected the twin brothers of Brazilian writer Joachim Maria Machado de Assis‘s 1904 novel to resemble their biblical counterparts — one smart, cunning and wily, the other strong yet slow, willing to sell his birthright for a bowl of soup.  Yet the title Esau and Jacob proves more of a foil to the brothers whose story it names, for the practical doctor Pedro and revolutionary lawyer Paolo squabble rather than feud, annoy rather than destroy each other.

The novel opens in mid-19th-century Brazil with the twins’ pregnant mother traveling to see a fortune teller, the cabocla, to inquire about her sons’ destiny.  The cabocla observes the twins fighting in their mother’s womb and issues a cryptic if not insincere prediction of their future greatness.  However, much like the novel’s title, the prophecy leads to high expectations that remain largely unfulfilled.

Machado de Assis sets Esau and Jacob, his fourth novel, in late-19th-century Brazil, a time of political turmoil marked by conflicts surrounding slavery, the overthrow of a monarchy, and the building of a tenuous republican system.  These events, however, color the pages of Esau and Jacob sporadically and only as background noise.  As children, Pedro supports the monarchy, while Paolo leans toward republicanism, though they do so more to antagonize each other than out of true conviction.  As adults, serving as members of parliament from opposing parties, they contest each other’s policies, yet exact details of their political ideals go unmentioned, for the novel’s focus remains the twins’ continual and mutual aggravation of each other rather than any legitimate grounds on which their disagreements might be based.  Thus it is no surprise that the novel’s primary conflict is not politics; it is love.

Pedro and Paolo love the same woman, Flora, the daughter of a civil servant who alternates between affection and indifference in her approach to her suitors.  Flora is unable to choose one twin above the other.  To Flora, the brothers are so alike, they are one; she cannot bear to hear one criticize the other, as the very act strikes her as contradictory and self-destructive.  When she is with Pedro, she stands up for Paolo, and vice versa, preserving the wholeness and oneness they represent to her at the expense of having her actions misinterpreted as indecision or aloofness.  Aires, the novel’s sometimes-narrator, assigns Flora a seemingly fitting adjective: inexplicable.  Flora’s efforts to force two conflicting men into one indivisible love ultimately consume her, as the twins’ incessant attempts to one-up each other — to arrive earlier, to write the best letter, to engage her in the more enjoyable conversation — drive her into a fever and an early grave.  Vowing to repair their relationship in Flora’s absence, the twins’ dormant competitiveness resurfaces almost immediately, and they soon find themselves in secret competition to see who can visit Flora’s grave the earliest, the longest, or while offering the best prayers and wreathes.  Even in the face of death and lost love, Pedro and Paolo fail to transcend the pettiness that has defined their relationship since childhood.

Critics try to locate deeper meaning within this pettiness.  Indeed, the jacket copywriter credits the twins with “liv[ing] out the conflicts of a nation trying to reconcile itself with the inexorable demands of progress.”  But the politics within the novel are so buried, and the brothers’ attempts at reconciliation (each time following the loss of a loved one) are only reactions to trauma; I see little evidence of “trying” and none of “progress.”  Perhaps this is an ironic critique of 19th-century Brazil, an exposé of a politically immature and stagnated country.  Such a critique befits the character of the novel’s ironic narrator, Aires, who often digresses into discussions of word choice and suppositions about his readers (“As for you, my gentleman friend or lady friend, depending on the sex of the person who reads me, if not two and of both sexes, an engaged couple, for example…”), juxtaposing politics and personal whims, fraternal fights with fancies, and never serious, even when rumors of incoming soldiers fill the town.  The result is a moderately amusing novel whose narrative tone undermines the potential gravity of its subjects — animosity, love, national progress — in a way that flattens the story, depriving it of both depth and sincerity.  The novel’s message is thus muddled, its characters either superficial or insufficiently explored, and Brazil’s future a vast unknown.

Absurdistan

Shteyngart, Gary. Absurdistan. New York: Random House, 2006.

I saw a nice democrat killed in front of me, and I try to grieve the best I can for him, but I can’t.  And I try to grieve for my papa, but nothing, as you say, ‘comes to mind about that.’  And I try to be good, I try to help people, but there’s no way to be good here, or if there is, I don’t know it.  And I’m scared, and I’m lonely, and I’m unhappy, and I’m chastising myself for being scared, and lonely, and unhappy, and for being alive for thirty years and having nobody [. . .] who would care for me.

- Misha Vainberg in Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan

*~*~*

 Gary Shteyngart‘s second novel, Absurdistan, revolves around Misha Vainberg, the thirty-year-old, obese heir to a Russian con man’s ill-begotten fortune.  Educated at the U.S.’s satirically named Accidental College and dating a former topless dancer from the Bronx, Misha returns to Russia to visit his father, only to be barred from re-entering the U.S. when his father murders an American businessman and is subsequently murdered himself.  In order to circumvent the visa restrictions preventing his return to America, Misha travels to the oil-rich nation of Absurdistan to buy a Belgian passport, only to find himself trapped in the midst of a third-world civil war.

Misha’s character is borderline sympathetic.  He is obsessed with sex — which, despite his girth, he is able to obtain from numerous attractive women, including his stepmother – and thinks constantly of his poorly circumcised penis.  He decides to found a charity, Misha’s Children, which he places under the charge of two prostitutes and a Russian artist without providing any guidelines as to how the charity ought to operate.  He also thinks he can rap.  Nonetheless, his adventures in Absurdistan, a former Soviet republic whose ironic name references the numerous countries Americans cannot identify on a map, reveal Misha as a symbol of recent Western intervention in countries abroad — wealthy, over-fed, mostly self-absorbed, somewhat well-intentioned yet bumbling and uninformed.  Misha quickly learns that Haliburton controls Absurdistan’s economy, their oil wells polluting the water and defining the skyline.  And when the oil runs out, Haliburton colludes with a handful of wealthy Absurdis to manufacture a civil war grounded upon ancient, meaningless religious differences in an effort to provoke U.S. involvement and to land the lucrative defense contracts that would inevitably accompany such involvement.  Misha learns too late that the oil is gone; he has already begun a relationship with the daughter of a corrupt Absurdi official, and he is trapped in a country where civil servants are gunned down and mothers prostitute their daughters so that they can afford to eat.  Misha experiences guilt and self-loathing when Americans still cannot locate Absurdistan on a map and USAID does not arrive.  On September 10, 2001, Misha makes a last-ditch effort to escape Absurdistan and return to New York.  Given the date, it is doubtful he makes it.

As a critique of the wealthy West’s global economic activities and of media coverage of third-world devastation, Shteyngart’s satire proves apt.  However, reading Absurdistan after reading Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, results in Absurdistan coming across as a more vulgar, less poignant rough draft of Super Sad.  Both novels feature wealthy, thirty-something, Russian male protagonists infatuated with non-white American women and fixated on sex.  Both novels rely on the characters’ loss of cell phone service to signify their lack of connection to other humans as the societies around them begin to crumble.  In its prologue, Absurdistan purports to be “a book about love;” however, it is more accurately a book about violence, loss, and emotional paralysis.  To experience these elements — along with more complex characters, better developed plot and satire, and love as well — I recommend Super Sad over Absurdistan any day.

The Fountainhead

Rand, Ayn.  The Fountainhead.  Centennial Edition.  New York: Signet, 2005.

A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others.  He doesn’t need it.

- Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

*~*~*

This is the motive and purpose of my writing; the projection of an ideal man.  The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself — to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.       [. . .] I write — and read — for the sake of the story.

- Ayn Rand’s The Goal of My Writing address, delivered at Lewis and Clark College on October 1, 1963

*~*~*

The highly partisan and seemingly incessant debate surrounding our national budget brought an interesting fact to light some months back: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) requires his staffers to read the works of Ayn Rand.  Ryan credits Rand for inspiring his political aspirations — she is the “reason I got involved in public service, by and large,” Ryan stated in December, 2010 — and interwove Rand’s Objectivist philosophy into his recently proposed budget, which seeks to transform Medicare into a voucher system for those under 55 and to make one third of Social Security funds available for private investment.  Fascinated by the impact a 20th-century novelist and philosopher is having on our 21st-century political and social landscape, I set out to read Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead.

The novel, initially set in 1920′s New York, opens with a juxtaposition of character foils whose conflicts and contrasts Rand sustains throughout The Fountainhead.  Howard Roark and Peter Keating are both students of architecture.  Roark is creative and uncompromising; he designs for the sake of design — his work is inherently original; it is art.  Keating, on the other hand, wished to be a painter but ultimately followed his mother’s pleas to channel his artistic ambitions into a more lucrative career as an architect.  His work imitates the Classical and Renaissance architects that preceded him; it is commonplace.  Yet Keating is charming and well-liked, and while Roark is expelled from college for failure to mimic old styles, Keating’s personality propels him into a prominent position at the firm of one of New York’s leading architects.

Howard Roark is Rand’s “ideal man,” as she wrote in 1963.  His integrity is perfect and absolute; he knows what he wants — to design, to build — and lets nothing stand in his way.  When he is expelled before taking his degree, he convinces a once great architect, Henry Cameron, to mentor him.  He accepts and is fired from numerous positions as a draftsman — stealing a few high-profile clients along the way with his deep understanding of clean, modern design and its integration with rather than destruction of existing landscape.  He is selfish, an egoist; he cares nothing for the opinions of others, existing on his own terms, pursuing his own happiness, his own goals.  In a powerful speech I felt compelled to read at least six times, Roark defines even love in selfish terms: ”I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, buy my ego and my my naked need.  This is the only way you can wish to be loved.  This is the only way I can want you to love me. [. . .] To say ’I love you,’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’” Love, then, is the coexistence of two entirely independent egos; their connection is one of celebration rather than sacrifice, affirmation rather than submission.  Love, like true happiness, is the product of independence, individuality, and selfishness, is a full-fledged commitment to the self, and Roark embodies this commitment consistently, fully.

Keating functions as Roark’s antithesis.  While Keating’s penchant for socializing and entertaining earn him status and authority within his firm and within the New York architectural community, he relies on Roark to revise his stale designs, as he lacks the originality and vision that Roark implements so easily.  Keating is perpetually self-conscious, feeding off the popularity others grant him, never confident in either his ability or likability: “He was great; great as the number of people who told him so.  He was right; right as the number of people who believed it.  He looked at the faces, at the eyes; he saw himself born in them.  He saw himself being granted the gift of life.”  Keating regurgitates opinions expressed in reviews and editorials when asked to proffer his opinions.  He marries his boss’s frigid daughter, Dominique Francon, because others expect it, abandoning his fiancee, Catherine Halsey, the only person with whom he is ever comfortably honest, in the process.  Keating exemplifies what Roark terms the second-hander, for he “lives within others” rather than within and for himself.  Keating loses his identity in his quest for others’ good opinion, and his character is reduced to sheer “indifference” by the novel’s end, as he is too empty to inspire even pity.

While the press praises Keating and condemns Roark, whose bold designs engender discomfort and offense, there are few characters who rightfully comprehend Roark’s greatness and Keating’s shallowness.  Architectural critic, columnist, and cultural authority Ellsworth Toohey perceives the distinction — and fears it.  Toohey is a Marxist; he uses his newspaper column to espouse the value of every man, to emphasize the common good.  He speaks at labor rallies, forms committees and clubs, advocates collective action and selfless motivation.  He praises convoluted novels and ridiculous plays; he lowers the cultural standard for what constitutes “art” so that the truly great are not appreciated and mediocrity rules — “Don’t set out to raze all shrines [. . .] Enshrine mediocrity — and the shrines are razed.”  His motives are sinister, for even he realizes the falseness, the impossibility of the values he proclaims: “Preach selflessness.  Tell man that he must live for others.  Tell men that altruism is the ideal.  Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will.”  True altruism is self-destruction, for selflessness requires one to supplant his desires with the needs and wants of others, the result of which is loss and servitude, “a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness.”  The selfless are thus left needy and pliant, easily manipulated by one such as Toohey, who understands that “where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings.”  Toohey, who proudly tells Keating, “I’m the most selfless man you’ve ever known,” goes so far as to enact his destructive theory of selflessness on his own niece, Catherine, who dedicates her life to social work only to age prematurely and lose the easygoing quality that made her so lovable to the young Keating.  “Great men can’t be ruled.  We don’t want any great men,” Toohey says while plotting to destroy Roark’s career.

Gail Wynand, Toohey’s employer, likewise enjoys corrupting the integrity of great men.  Owner of a powerful and popular newspaper, the Banner, Wynand hires individuals of impeccable integrity for the sole purpose of corrupting that integrity.  He pays scientists to champion mysticism and atheists to advocate religious faith; he pays such men exorbitant salaries for the pleasure of watching them break.  Wynand is shrewd — he rightfully despises Toohey — and when he finds a person of truly unfaltering integrity (Roark), he respects, befriends, even loves him.  Yet Wynand is no egoist; he craves power too much.  There is a paradoxical weakness inherent in power, for all rulers require subjects to rule and are thus dependent on others, as Roark explains: Rulers “create nothing.  They exist entirely through the persons of others.  Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.  They are as dependent as the beggar.”  Indeed, Wynand’s pursuit of power and unmitigated influence proves his downfall.  When he seeks to defend Roark through Banner editorials, to bend public opinion towards greatness rather than towards the mediocre, Wynand experiences the limit of his power when the public resists, rejects Roark, and greatly reduces the Banner‘s circulation.

Roark finds his near-equal only in Dominique Francon.  Like Wynand, Dominique admires pure integrity, as Wynand, her second husband, observes: “Do you know what you’re actually in love with?  Integrity.  The impossible.  The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.       [. . .] But you want it in the flesh.  You’re in love with it.”  Initially, Dominique does not believe perfect integrity exists; thus she makes a farce of all pretense toward integrity, mocking charitable organizations that ask her to speak at their events, telling her boss that she desires perfection “– or nothing.  So, you see, I take nothing.”  She feels nothing, loves nothing, takes nothing seriously.  This changes when she meets Roark, whose genius she senses immediately and whose sexual assault (disturbingly) forces her to acknowledge the existence of a human perfection she once thought impossible: “They had been united in an understanding beyond the violence, beyond the deliberate obscenity of his action; had she meant less to him, he would not have taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so desperately.  The unrepeatable exultation was in knowing that they both understood this.”  This exhultation becomes instant love, yet Roark knows that Dominique is not ready for the selfish, self-affirming love he demands.  Thus Dominique seeks to destroy what she cannot have — sabotaging Roark’s career with scathing editorials, disuading potential clients from offering Roark commissions — and to punish herself with a soulless marriage to Keating.  She defiantly yet proudly tells her boss at the Banner, “[N]othing that you do to me — or to [Roark] — will be worse than what I’ll do to myself [. . .] wait till you see what I can take.”  Dominique maintains her integrity, her reverence for Roark, her essential self throughout her self-imposed trials and emerges ready to love as Roark always wished — selfishly, celebrating her self as she simultaneously reveres his.

Rand’s theories are interesting, sometimes mind-bending — that selflessness leads to self-annihilation; that a rape produces self-awareness and, consequently, freedom; that selfishness is desireable, reasonable, natural, and results in perfect love.  I recommend reading The Fountainhead simpy for the intellectual exhileration that comes from attempting to rationally justify egocentrism, to glorify selfishness and unfettered independence as “the only gauge of human virtue and value.”  In short, one does not need to believe the philosophy Rand and her characters espouse in The Fountainhead to appreciate the intellectual exercise of tracing Rand’s path to her conclusions.

Applying Rand’s philosophy to a system of government, however, remains a stretch.  A dictator or monarch would find himself trapped in the contradiction of power that entraps Wynand — namely, that a ruler is dependent upon the ruled for his power.  Similarly, an elected official is dependent upon his constituents; he cannot govern if there is no one to govern.  The entire concept of government, too, is collective — “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address — that cannot function if is representatives or those they represent are entirely self-consumed.  Any government that values the individual only, that views programs to aid the poor, unemployed, and elderly — Social Security, Medicare, unemployment — as instruments of parasitic motive that corrupt those they seek to aid by discouraging self-reliance cannot be “of the people, by the people, for the people.”  It would instead be of the egoist, by the selfish, for the individual, in which case government would implode and cease to exist, and all those services that benefit us all — interstate highways, hydroelectric dams, medical care for the elderly — would be unmaintained or expunged.  A Rand-inspired government is no government at all — which, I fear, is exactly what Paul Ryan and his Tea Party compatriots seek.

Into the Forest

Hegland, Jean.  Into the Forest.  London: Arrow Books, 1998.

Somehow we reach the flat.  Eva sinks to the ground, and I fall beside her, holding her, rocking her in my arms, muttering praise and thanks and blessings to all the things beyond and within us that allowed us to reach this place.  When I finally raise my head to look around, I see the dank forest, the rain-dark sky, the roofed stump filled with barrels, and for a moment I know I am crazy.

- Nell in Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest

*~*~*

A friend loaned me his copy of Jean Hegland‘s Into the Forest because Hegland, now a creative writing instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College, was raised in our small town of Pullman, Washington.  While reading Hegland’s novel, however, I couldn’t help but think of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which I finished not long ago.  Both stories are set in a United States crippled by both financial and governmental meltdown; Hegland’s novel, however, offers a quieter, more measured narrative populated by more isolated, wholesome characters. 

Teenaged sisters Eva and Nell reside in a Northern California forest thirty miles from the nearest town.  When the collapse of infrastructure and the onset of disease make food, gasoline, and human kindness scarce, when cancer claims their mother and an accident takes their father, the orphaned siblings are forced to abandon their passions in order to focus on survival.  At first, they try to preserve what remnants of high culture and education they can — Eva practices ballet to a metronome while Nell reads her father’s set of encyclopedias — but the longer the lights stay off, the more their food supply dwindles, more basic needs begin to take precedence.  Nell turns down a haphazard journey to Boston with her former crush Eli to instead combine instinct, her father’s canning lessons, and what information she can glean from the books around the house to learn gardening, canning, drying, and, eventually, hunting and medicine.  When a passing man rapes Eva and she subsequently becomes pregnant, Nell becomes the de facto family leader, gathering wild fruits and herbs and shooting wild pigs in an effort to nourish and protect her weakened sister.  In the end, after numerous deaths, arguments, injuries and close calls, Eva and Nell grow to appreciate both the bounty of nature and each other, relying on one another rather than on the fantasy of an increasingly improbable rescue.

While the novel’s emphasis on love and self-sufficiency is both sweet and sensible, I found the narrative pace slow.  The initial two thirds of the novel consist largely of flashbacks — trips to town to get drunk with teenaged boys, learning to can beans, the girls watching their mother weave — and silence broken only by the click of Eva’s metronome.  I suppose the pace accurately reflects the sudden slowness of a life cut off from modern amenities, but Into the Forest nonetheless proves difficult to read due to its lack of inertia.  When the novel does pick up the pace — a rape, a pregnancy, a new garden, a birth, a hunt, a bear, a fire — the activity seems forced and jarring in comparison to the earlier stillness of internal monologue and waiting.  The result is a rather unbalanced tale of sisterly love and survival, which, though Nell’s narration is at times beautiful and deep, lacks the bite of Shteyngart’s satire, rendering its post-apocalyptic setting surprisingly boring.

J.D. Salinger: A Life

Slawenski, Kenneth.  J.D. Salinger: A Life.  New York: Random House, 2010.

I know I am known as a strange, aloof kind of person.  I pay for this kind of attitude.

- J.D. Salinger in a 1974 New York Times interview

*~*~*

J.D. Salinger, best known for authoring The Catcher in the Rye (1951), valued and guarded his privacy.  Tucked away on his forested acreage in Cornish, New Hampshire, Salinger isolated himself from family, friends, and fans alike, perched before his typewriter on a discarded car seat, composing novels, novellas, and short stories, none of which saw publication after 1965, though Salinger lived until 2010.  Kenneth Slawenski‘s new biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, seeks to tell the story of this famously reclusive storyteller.  In A Life, Slawenski coalesces eight years of research into a chronological collage of biography and literary analysis, drawing on Salinger’s published and unpublished works, as well as on his ample, pre-1965 correspondence, which is now archived at the New York Public Library, Princeton, and the University of Texas at Austin.  Though Salinger vehemently opposed the public archiving of his correspondence (in 1987, Salinger successfully sued Ian Hamilton for quoting from these letters in J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life) and scorned the re-release the less polished stories of his early career, Slawenski’s approach to these materials in A Life is always respectful and often reverential, as he presents Salinger as a man damaged by love and war struggling to heal himself through writing.

Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 to a doting mother of Irish decent and to a Jewish father, who worked for a company that imported European meats and cheeses.  Despite the fact that his childhood coincided with the Great Depression, Salinger’s upbringing was one of comfort and affluence.  Like his character, Holden Caulfield, Salinger attended prep school, where he exhibited sociability and creativity but was markedly lacking in work ethic.  He later enrolled at Columbia, where he decided to become a writer after reading Faulkner under the tutelage of Whit Burnett, but he left without taking his degree.  He engaged in a brief romance with Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, though she later left him for actor Charlie Chaplin.

Though Salinger suffered following O’Neill’s rejection, the true suffering began when Salinger, who had been drafted into the army in 1943, was sent to serve in the D-Day invasion at Normandy, where he was in the second wave of soldiers to storm the beach.  From there Salinger proceeded to Hürtgen Forest, where he disabled landmines that the Germans quickly replaced in a two-month-long engagement generally “viewed by historians as a military failure and a waste of human life.”  After failing to take the forest for the Allies, Salinger’s regiment proceeded to Luxembourg, where it took part in the Battle of the Bulge, after which it proceeded to liberate six concentration camps in the Dachau network.  After VE Day, after watching his fellow soldiers die uselessly in Hürtgen, after witnessing the horrors of Dachau, Salinger traveled to Austria in search of a family that had once hosted him during a pre-war European excursion, only to learn that this family had perished in Hitler’s camps.  Salinger then checked himself into a military hospital on account of ”battle fatigue,” or what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Amazingly, Salinger wrote and submitted stories for publication throughout the war.  Slawenski views the stories Salinger composed in 1944-45 as a lens into the author’s soul, equating the characters’ struggles with seemingly senseless death and their subsequent affirmation of the world’s beauty as a mirror to Salinger’s psychological turmoil and emotional progress. 

After a rash, ill-fated marriage to a German opthomologist, Salinger returned to the U.S., where in 1947 he became a salaried writer at The New Yorker and penned his first and only published novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which drew upon several of Salinger’s previously published stories and was released to great critical acclaim in 1951.  Salinger’s subsequent collections — Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — an Introduction (1963) — were likewise immensely popular — among readers if not among critics.  During this prolific decade, Salinger also remarried, fathered two children, and purchased the property in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he would live until his death.

Yet Salinger was unprepared for the fame his success inevitably brought, and he shunned his newfound status as celebrity and cultural icon.  A Zen Buddhist and follower of Vedantic mystic Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger, in Slawenski’s view, embraced writing as both a calling and a form of meditative prayer.  Thus the characters in his later works grow more contemplative, more spiritual, effectively functioning as mouthpieces for Salinger’s Vedantic views.  Salinger continually struggled to subordinate his ego, to achieve peace and humility, but this proved difficult with fan mail and positive reviews inflating the very ego he sought to contain.  Salinger’s response, therefore, was to withdraw from the world that jeopardized his spiritual growth, as well as to retain tight control over the works he had already deigned to release.  Salinger insisted on plain, stark designs for the covers of his books, prohibited the use of his photograph on book jackets, and forbade the reprinting of his earlier stories, even by editors who had once been his friends.  He ordered his agent to destroy thirty years worth of correspondence to prevent such letters from landing at the University of Texas at Austin, and, after The New Yorker published “Hapworth 16, 1924″ in 1965, no new Salinger works ever appeared in print again.  Salinger died peacefully in Cornish 45 years later.  His family has yet to comment on the status or volume of unreleased works Salinger produced during his four decades of public silence.

Slawenski’s dedication to his subject is admirable, his research diligent and copious; nonetheless, A Life violates the most basic tenet of literary criticism in that it conflates Salinger’s characters with Salinger himself.  While an author’s personal experience often does — indeed, must — inform the works he or she produces, it is irresponsible to assume that characters speak for their creator, even if the narration is in the first person, and even if, like Salinger, the author admits to writing from experience.  Thus, when Slawenski declares that “Salinger aligns himself completely with the narrator” in “The Last and Best of Peter Pans” or references “A Boy in France” as proof that Salinger underwent a “religious experience” during WWII, we must remember that such statements represent an enthusiastic biographer’s speculation rather than documented fact.  Slawenski’s biographical readings of Salinger’s fictional characters prove particularly ironic when, late in A Life,  Slawenski argues that characters achieve an existence, a resonance beyond their creators: “Holden [Caulfield] had long ago meshed with the lives of readers.  He belonged to the rebel who admired him, the outcast who drew strength from him, the young girl enamored of him. [. . . Holden was] uniquley re-created each time a reader opened a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.”  In this reader-response model, Salinger’s characters are neither Salinger nor his embodiments; instead, they exist independently, impacting each reader differently.  Thus Holden Caulfield became both a symbol of ’60s resistance and the inspiration for Mark David Chapman’s murder of John Lenon.  If Salinger and his characters are one and the same, each story has but one interpretation, one correct answer, which belongs to Salinger himself; Slawenski cannot responsibly argue along these lines and then later endorse the reader-response position when it proves convenient (i.e. Slawenski takes issue with Salinger’s argument that he owed Holden Caulfield in a 2009 lawsuit against a Swedish publisher that tried to publish a sequel to Catcher.).  Furthermore, Slawenski’s description of Salinger fans’ internet tributes to Salinger’s works following the author’s death is overly sentimental and even inappropriate.  While Salinger would have felt honored by the revived interest in his works his death engendered, he would have found fans filming their responses to the news of his death and posting them online showy and self-aggrandizing.

Nevertheless, if we distinguish the biography from the literary while carefully acknowledging their overlaps, we walk away from J.D. Salinger: A Life with a rekindled affection for the man who brought us Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass.  Slawenski’s biography details the horrors and hardships Salinger endured while serving in WWII, which most likely contributed to his eccentricity and informed both the despair and epiphanies later experienced by his characters. Indeed, Slawenski’s love for and commitment to Salinger’s works is pervasive and palpable throughout A Life.  Nonetheless, for obvious reasons, Salinger would hate it.

Super Sad True Love Story

Shteyngart, Gary.  Super Sad True Love Story.  New York: Random House, 2010.

[I]f there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work — learn to choose.  You are good enough, you are human enough, to choose.

- Lenny Abramov in Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

*~*~*

It is the not-too-distant future, a post-literate, debt-driven, technologically saturated future.  People read text, not books, which are considered overly demanding in a culture that reads nothing lengthier than that which fills the screen of an äppärät, an iPhone on steroids that allows you to publicly rank the attractiveness of those surrounding you while simultaneously broadcasting your collective credit scores.  Responsible journalism has given way to random streaming, as untrained members of the new Media broadcast advertisements, sex, and decontextualized observations from their äppäräti.  This is a hypersexualized world of transparent jeans and porn for children, a hyperstratified world of racial and class tension.  This is the future Gary Shteyngart‘s Super Sad True Love Story envisions.

Super Sad True Love Story centers on Lenny Abramov, a 39-year-old Russian American who falls for 24-year-old Korean-American Eunice Park.  Lenny works for the aptly named Post-Human Services division of the Wapachung Contingency, located in a former synagogue to signify the replacement of religious belief with technology and youth-worship.  His job is to recruit and evaluate high net worth individuals (HNWIs) willing to pay top dollar (as long as it’s backed by the much stronger Chinese yuan) for immortality.  Those who successfully complete Lenny’s screening process are those who respond stoically to emotional stimuli, those who can handle watching their children grow old and die, those who lack empathy and compassion.  Only those sufficiently wealthy and heartless are approved for the dechronification treatments that repair cellular damage and restore youth.  Lenny, an anachronism of sorts in that he still owns and reads “smelly” books, clings to Eunice and her literal and symbolic youth, motivated by a fear of mortality, not because he fears physical death, but rather because the finitude of life demands that we make something of it, that we justify and locate meaning in our existence.  And finding meaning in a world of incessant shopping, of debilitating personal and national debt, in which even government signs bear misspellings is no easy feat. 

Lenny attempts to create and sustain meaning by falling in love with Eunice, by supplanting post-human isolation with human connection.  But Eunice, despite her near-biological attachment to her äppärät and porno-worthy underwear, is perhaps too human on certain levels in that she is wounded and broken in ways so many of us are.  She grew up in an abusive household, where her mother and sister walked on eggshells in an effort to appease Eunice’s alcoholic doctor-father.  As a result, Eunice both loves and hates her father, leading her to both distance herself from him and take great pains to protect him during the financial and societal collapse that ensues when China revokes its support of the U.S. financial system.  This emotional oxymoron in turn informs all of her relationships with men.  Angry and love-starved, Eunice seeks the attention of the kind though bumbling Lenny, the low net worth individual (LNWI) activist David, and the Wapachung tycoon Joshie, vacillating between love, conscientiousness, and filial duty as she wanders from man to man.  Through his tense, flailing relationship with Eunice Park, Lenny indeed experiences the human in the post-human world, learning the painful lesson that to be human, despite the emotional richness thereof, is to be damaged, struggling, aging, dying. 

I didn’t like this book when I first began to read it.  The writing seemed splintered, the content vulgar and borderline pornographic.  It wasn’t until I began to glimpse our current society — our cell phone/blue tooth/email/GPS/Facebook reliance, our recent financial meltdown — that I could appreciate Shteyngart’s Orwellian depiction of our national and cultural future.  When Lenny laments, “My äppärät isn’t connecting.  I can’t connect,” he alludes to the disconnection, fragmentation, and isolation technology has brought to human relationships.  When Lenny’s dating friends, Noah and Amy, simultaneously stream their respective verbal blogs, talking next to each other without actually communicating, I think of all the couples I see walking down the street, holding hands, each talking on a cell phone to someone other than the person whose hand they are holding. The world Shteyngart depicts in Super Sad True Love Story simply takes this scenario one step further; he presents a world in which we have stopped holding hands.

After finishing the novel, I recommend Super Sad True Love Story wholeheartedly.  Shteyngart’s dark, biting, hilarious satire ultimately proves winning, as he constructs a postmodern, post-literate, post-human society that aptly deconstructs and critiques our own.  It is a plea for love in a world that may soon forget what love is.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Mengestu, Dinaw.  The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.

Where is the grand narrative of my life?  The one I could spread out and read for clues as to what to expect next.  It seems to have run out, if such a thing is possible.  It’s harder to admit that perhaps it had never been there at all.

- Sepha Stephanos in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

*~*~*

Dinaw Mengestu borrows the title of his debut novel from the closing canto of Dante’s Inferno, in which Dante’s pilgrim climbs the giant, frozen body of Satan and emerges from hell to see stars, “Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.”  In Mengestu’s novel, Joseph, an immigrant from the DRC, a former student and current waiter, adores the Inferno‘s final lines because, as an African who has escaped both war and dictatorship, he correlates the pilgrim’s journey through and out of hell with his own immigration.  Yet the relevance of Dante to The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears on the whole is broader and deeper than Joseph’s reader-response critique reveals, as the novel, like Dante’s epic, is ultimately a tale of loss, wandering, and finding one’s rightful place.

Dante’s pilgrim begins his journey by waking in the woods and finding himself surrounded by allegorical monsters.  Mengestu’s protagonist, Sepha Stephanos, begins his journey in Ethiopia, where his father is murdered by the ruling regime after Sepha brings revolutionary pamphlets into their home.  Sepha escapes to the Washington, D.C. area to share his uncle’s apartment, work at a hotel, and dabble in university education.  The longer Sepha remains in the U.S., the less connected he feels to his homeland, the less contact he has with his mother and brother, and yet he simultaneously fails to forge new bonds with his adopted country.  Sepha attempts to rectify his fractured sense of belonging by moving out of his uncle’s all-immigrant apartment building and opening his own business, Logan’s Market, a convenience store in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood called Logan’s Circle.  Yet even this large step towards the American dream leaves Sepha feeling detached and unfulfilled — until a white woman and her biracial daughter move in next door.

The white woman, Judith, is a college professor with a fondness for Emerson and remodeling old houses.  She buys and refurbishes a dilapidated mansion next to Sepha’s apartment in Logan Circle, and her daughter, Naomi, begins frequenting Sepha’s store.  Naomi’s father, a Mauritanian economics professor named Ayad, is off teaching in Europe; thus Sepha becomes a surrogate father of sorts, as he and Naomi create imaginary friends and read The Brothers Karamazov to fill the slow afternoons in Sepha’s store.  The biracial Naomi eventually serves as a link between her white American mother and black African pseudo-father, bringing the three together into an awkward, witty pseudo-family.

Sepha longs to transform his tenuous adopted family into a real family, to provide himself with the sense of permanence and place he has lacked since childhood.  He tries to emulate Judith; he reads the books she admires, the books she has written, and goes through several rolls of wrapping paper trying to make his Christmas gifts appear as attractive as the ones that fill Judith’s living room.  But an ill-spoken joke on Judith’s part jars Sepha back to reality: He is not like her, nor can he ever be.

Discontent with his status as a figurative wandering pilgrim, Sepha hopes he can repair the relationship, but further wedge issues develop nonetheless.  As more affluent whites move into Logan’s Circle, rents rise, forcing the neighborhood’s poorer, black residents to move or be evicted.  Judith gets heckled at a community meeting when she attempts to convince Logan Circle’s long-time residents that she shares their concerns and frustrations, a humiliating moment that unveils the divide between black and white, rich and poor that Sepha had previously sought to ignore.

In the post-meeting portion of the novel, Sepha leaves his store and goes on a long, aimless walk — to his uncle’s, to the restaurant where Joseph works, and back to Logan’s Circle.  He roams among family, friends, and the familiar, comtemplating his life’s losses, mirroring Dante’s pilgrim as he drifts through a personal hell of displacement and indecision.  Yet at the end of his journey, Sepha sees not stars but his store, dumpy and dirty, yet nonetheless his own, offering hope and home in a fragmented world simply because it is his.

While we witness the pilgrim’s encounter with God at he end of Dante’s Paradiso, we never see the end of Sepha’s journey.  Whether or not he can stave off eviction depends on neighborhood forces and his rekindled commitment to working regular hours.  However, life’s journeys are often as important and transformational as their endings, if not more so; therefore, Mengestu’s roundabout novel is worth reading not for its conclusion, but for its contemplation, illumination and hope.