Douglas Coupland,

I flipped a mental coin to decide whether to read this book or Sons and Lovers first.  Since none of the four socks in my sock drawer matched,  I picked up All Families are Psychotic. From now on I’ll be more careful about having matching socks on hand.

I should admit firstly to relative ignorance regarding contemporary fiction.  After years of studying the most critically influential texts in the world (a class of work heavily skewed towards dead authors), I think it’s possible that I have become a literary snob.  I don’t mean this as some backhanded way of claiming to be exceptionally erudite or well-read: “It’s not as good as Hamlet” not only sounds pompous, but isn’t a valuable criticism either.  I acknowledge that it’s a ridiculous omission.  In his famous essay on William Faulkner, Jean-Paul Sartre explains how time in Faulkner’s novels is always the already-past.  The metaphor he uses is sitting in the back of a truck staring backwards, which I think is a great way of describing us English majors who have impeccable critical hind-sights.  Think of Jeff Daniels’ character in The Squid and the Whale (constantly denigrating certain books as “minor works”) as what readers who have passed through the academy should fear becoming.  On the other hand, I don’t think it’d be much fun to mindlessly pound through loads of books as fast as possible without pausing to think a bit on them (hence this site).

Turning to All Families are Psychotic, though, I’ll start with the positive: the first paragraph is quite nice—especially her scar, which, when he links it to gum, seems to recall a juvenile gesture of rebellion like sticking gum under a table (Joachim Phoenix on Letterman[8:45]).  If it’s like gum, though, is it formless?  Maybe he means shapeless—or does he mean to cast back to Gen 1.2 where the world is “without form,” or “formless,” &c.?  If the rest of the book was better, I might have believed this resonance was intentional; as is, it must have been accidental, which is fine because the uncreated world seems antithetical to the idea of a scar.  Anyway, the first paragraph is fine.  Possibly the reason is editorial scrutiny: they hadn’t given up yet.  Other reasons are that the plot hasn’t gotten ridiculous yet, no characters have had to give tedious and obvious exposition (like who has what disease), and the characters aren’t contradicting themselves.

The other sections of the story I did enjoy (I am being constructive) were almost exclusively concerning the children.  Chapter eight (when the trio light the roof on fire with the balloon) actually had me laughing rather than rolling my eyes.  The scene when young Wade takes the taxi out to his sister at the summer camp is also nice.  It must be these scenes that Alex Clark at The Guardian is thinking of when he writes about Coupland’s “blissed-out pessimism and Salingeresque sentimentality,” a statement I find appallingly untrue, especially considering children appear in about 2 of the 25 chapters.  I think the reason these scenes were my favourite is that they’re like Soylent Green (the food product, not the book or film featuring Charleston Heston): made of people!  This is in contrast to most of the book, which concerns sad fleshy automata doing stupid things for even stupider reasons.

Style, characterization, plot—It’s hard for me to think of an aspect of the book I didn’t dislike, which is an intense shame because he is very local.  I think the weak characters’ absent motivations frustrated me most of all: does anyone think to him- or herself “Hey, hey, my, my” when they find Volkswagen keys, or is it so important to Coupland that he reference Neil Young the characters can suck it?  I’m not faulting this because it’s inauthentic speech, but because it’s not even an attempt—character is sublimated to reference.  Unfortunately for Coupland, it’s not always wise to rely too heavily on references or well-recognized turns.  The restaurant robbery sent me back to similar scenes in Pulp Fiction, Sudden Impact, “The Killers” by Hemingway (and its bastardized appearance in A History of Violence), &c.  The comparison is appropriate, but unfortunate because this robbery is so trifling and ridiculous and uneven and glibly presented—really, the worst restaurant heist scene I have ever read or watched, I think. Of course, most of the episodes are stupid.

Now, after having written all that, I’m conflicted.  Reading it, I thought “WOW what a terrible book.”  Sometimes when I look back at it, though, I want to think the book was some big parody of Jerry Springer families, road novels, heist capers, &c., none of it meant seriously.  The problem, though, is that it’s hard to see the ironic distance when the characters, insofar as they feel anything, seem to think their actions make sense.  I feel like the absurdity is often a consequence of the writing, and definitely there are scenes that were meant with at least attempted seriousness—the “Salingeresque sentimentality” of the kids, for example.  Besides, the parody is often unnecessary.  Nobody could write something like The Tempest anymore, so why does Prospero (Coupland made him a wealthy Swiss man called Florian in the book) have to appear at the end to cure AIDS?

In closing, though, there was a good review in the NYT: (not good to Coupland, mind you)

“The assertion of the title seems to be that the Drummonds are not uniquely blighted: they’re typical. . . . This is true, of course. It’s also trite and curiously insulting. The real problem with the Drummonds isn’t AIDS or any other disease—it’s vacuity.

The title of the review is “Bad Stuff Happens.”  The joke is that you can’t tell whether this refers to the plot or Coupland’s career.

Here are some of my favourite 1-star reviews from Amazon.  I really love that someone would write a review and spell horribal like that, or that someone else would blame it for the presumed downfall of America.

Horribal Book, November 12, 2004

By	Earth Shadow (Pa) – See all my reviews

Ahhh! I /hated/ this book! I had to read it for school and I didn’t even finish it. Please, /never/ buy this book. It is like the plague, and should be avoided as such! *Shivers* It gives me the shivers to even think about it.

it …., January 20, 2003

By	anonymous (nc) – See all my reviews

the book is nothing but a democratic self centered view of life. i could care less about reading a book with a cry-baby wining about his life. this is the type of action that drags this country into the black hole of depression. if a book moves a person and it does not have the words holy bible on the front of it, it shows how lost the person it “moved” really is.

I am the only person in the world who didn’t read The Catcher in the Rye in her or his teens, but I thought it was good in spite of this.  I’ve been called “a gentleman and a scholar” before, but I didn’t know it was from this book (it’s meant ironically, mind you).  Everything I have ever read about the book trumpets it as a balm for disaffected youth, so I assumed it might not be actually good.  Unfortunately, the platitudes spewed because of the book’s fame obscures that it’s not just for kids full of angst and ennui, and far from it, in my opinion.  I think the fixation on its apparent subversiveness is a lazy or willful underweight reading.  It’s a reductionist reading that has been kind to him in terms of sales, of course, but I doubt that an author whose overriding concern seems to be control—control of his image, control of texts down to italicizing individual letters—would be happy with his unthinking cult following.  (Unfortunately for J.D., you can’t control your product after you’ve let it out of your hands, and better not to try—as Timberland boots or Cristal champagne have learned; perhaps that’s why he stopped publishing?)  One problem with viewing the novel only as a vehicle for Holden the everyteen is that this subjects it to young tastes, which a NYT article suggests are anti-Holden and pro-Potter.

While I’d agree that Holden is unsatisfied, he’s not some middle-American teen that can’t wait to get away to the big city.   Holden is in a position of privilege and has the ability to do almost anything, but prefers not to: he’s like a cynical son of Jay Gatsby or wannabe-badass Bartleby.  Basically I’m saying that The Catcher in the Rye isn’t Footloose (!), by which I mean there’s no point where readers can say “oh everything would be ok if he could only dance!”  In reaction to these seemingly closed possibilities for Holden, I originally thought he was awfully grown up to see and hate all the phonyness around him.  Compared to later Salinger characters, though, he’s at an intermediate stage of growing up.  Like Franny in Franny and Zooey, he’s horrified by the world as it is.  Franny, though, has Zooey to tell her to embrace the flawed embodiment of the world as is: shine your shoes even if nobody will see them—in Seymour’s words, to do it for the fat lady.

While I don’t think it’s as good as 9 stories, I also don’t think it’s as terrible as some critics have claimed.  (It’s more fun to heap scorn on a loved text than an unknown one.)  A contemporary review by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reads:

The Catcher in the Rye is now, you’ll be told just about anywhere you ask, an “American classic,” right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading The Catcher in the Rye after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.

Yardley faults The Catcher in the Rye for being emotionally manipulative, which might be true (Holden has a cute sister and a dead older brother), but seems peripheral most of the time: (it’s not like The Lovely Bones, where the premise of the whole book is some dramatic and exploitive violence, for example).  Another fault Yardley notes is that the writing is phony: “[Salinger's] characters forever say ‘ya’ for ‘you,’ as in ‘ya know,’ which no American except perhaps a slapstick comedian ever has said. Americans say ‘yuh know’ or ‘y’know,’ but never ‘ya know.’”  I’d say that’s hardly relevant, and that it’s a novel not a photograph.  That said, my biggest complaint against the text is related.  Phony or not, Holden is tiring to listen to.  Salinger sticks to his irritating young narrator in a way that dominates the text, something Buddy doesn’t do so completely in Franny and Zooey. I have wondered before whether it’s fair to criticize a conscious decision by the author to narrate a text via a character whose style we fault. While the narrative voice Salinger develops for The Catcher in the Rye might not be my favourite, I’ll admit that it wouldn’t be the same novel without it, so I should probably just endure the sonuvabitch of a moron.

If you’ve never read it, this cartoon pretty much sums it up.

Early on when I started writing down my reactions to the books I was reading, I sometimes didn’t write much.  I think I have one sentence about The Catcher in the Rye, and almost as little for Desolation Angels.  After spending at least five days reading The Trial, all I had to say about it at the time was that I thought Kafka wasn’t as great as I had been lead to believe—“famous beyond all reason.”  I read and enjoyed Metamorphoses, but I had a much more difficult time with The Trial because the style is frustrating.  ”Are comma splices a legitimate stylistic technique?” I asked myself.  It turns out that there’s a pretty good answer to that:

“Kafka’s prevalent use of what we call a comma splice has been perfectly acceptable in German prose since the eighteenth century.” -Breon Mitchell

Looking back, my criticisms of the style of the novel isn’t a fair criticism of a translated text.  It’s possible that I wouldn’t like Kafka’s style, but reading The Trial in English, all I can assume is that either I had a bad translation (it’s an old used copy), or that sentence structure is necessarily garbled in translation (and that any analysis of the style of a translated book is simply an analysis of the style of the translator).  The preceding quotation, though, is from a very good afterword by The Trial‘s most recent translator that answers that kind of question.

Since I don’t have it with me, I’m not sure which translation I have, but certainly not a new one.  Considering his fame, solid info on the translation history of Kafka is surprisingly difficult to come by (by which I mean Wikipedia doesn’t know!)  The text has a foreward by Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, which justifies not burning Kafka’s manuscripts (as Brod had been instructed).  The first translations into English were by Willa and Edwin Muir, and have had scorn heaped on them by subsequent translators.  Following the initial versions were the “Definitive” editions of the 1950s, and now the “Critical” editions starting in the late 1990s.

Aside from the problem of translation, this novel was never completed, and as such there are gaps.  Mr. K is going along through the processes of this odd court, and then all of a sudden he is being hanged.  It’s surprisingly unproblematic to the book, though; it just feels like the sudden conclusion of something that has been dragging K. in that direction the whole time, however slowly.  Since my memory of specifics is spotty, I’m not sure, but I wondered while reading it if perhaps the narrator is astonishingly unreliable.  I don’t remember what specifics I was thinking of.

In the popular sphere, the novel acts as a convenient shorthand for frustrating bureaucracy in many situations—arbitrary detentions, for example—but I feel like this is dramatically reductionist; I guess that’s not a huge newsflash, but I doubt Kafka was having trouble renewing his dog license or getting a zoning variance permit to build a new deck for his barbeque when he decided to write a book about terrible and obscure bureaucracy.  The parable K. hears in the cathedral offers relatively clear evidence of this.  (The article by the translator posted above notes that the German title (Der Process) refers not only to a trial, but to “proceedings surrounding it . . . includ[ing] preliminary investigations, numerous hearings, and a wide range of legal and extra-legal maneuvering.”)  It’s in this wider view that the parable that K. hears in the church—”Before The Law”—makes more sense.  The parable is worth reading (or listening to) by itself just because it appears to make pretty big spiritual claims without demanding anything.  I’m not at all sure what it means, only that you should read it translated here, or better yet, let Orson Welles lend it some serious gravitas by watching the opening scene of his film version of it, where it has been moved to a kind of epigraph.

Lastly, I can’t mention Kafka without mentioning Home Movies’ Franz Kafka Rock Opera!

Frustratingly, there are no 1/5 (or even 2/5) reviews on Amazon.  I suppose because there are so few reviews (35, vs. >200 for Franny and Zooey).  I don’t think eager highschoolers are as likely to read this, and if they do (after reading On The Road) they aren’t the type to admit to disliking it.

There is a synopsis available here that covers the general activity but not specifics (of which there are many when he is in San Francisco, &c.)

My first reaction to this book was Uh Oh.  I think I should have read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction before I changed styles so dramatically.  I complained about Buddy’s Victorian coal-baron style, but at least it didn’t require many trips to the dictionary.  Three pages into Desolation Angels and I already have to look up Suspire, Burble, and Welp, and find out who W.E. Woodward is, and what the Lankavatara Scripture is, not to mention other words that may or may not be actual words that I feel compelled to look up just in case.  The first sentence is about a page long.  Now, I have never read any Kerouac, so this is similar to my experience with Salinger in that I am reading a lesser-known work by someone overwhelmingly famous for something else.  The reason I didn’t read On The Road first is that used copies are even harder to come by than The Catcher in the Rye which is impossible to find: They’re behind-the-counter books in at least a few used bookstores.  I get the sense that On The Road is fetishized in the same way The Catcher in the Rye is, only even more so because of “The Roll.”

Thankfully, Desolation Angels is either too long or too difficult to be as hip as On The Road, although the author still seems to be pretty hip (Kerouac and all his equally famous though pseudonymed pals get up to their shenanigans at certain points in the text).  That said, much of the text is not famous beats drifting about.  Yes, Duluoz travels from the Pacific Northwest to California to New York to North Africa, but the novel’s first section, when he is on Hozomeen Peak is longer, than the others.  I admit that I found it intensely difficult, and spent most of the time reading that section thinking Come down from that mountain!  In retrospect, of course, it’s nice that he stays in one place for more than a couple of days.  The time in the mountain has mystical elements like Franny and Zooey, only intensely broad and unfocused.  Franny and Zooey may be syncretic, but it focuses closely on the Jesus prayer and embodiment; Desolation Angels is a more unfocused mysticism (or is it simply that I know nothing about Buddhism?), and its abandonment when Duluoz comes down the mountain with broken shoes and not much received wisdom.

When he comes down from the mountain and starts moving around, the text shifts from his solitary rambling mystical thoughts to a ramble of people and places.  I think it was Truman Capote who said Kerouac’s work was “not writing but typing.”  I wonder sometimes looking at it what kinds of things he must have cut out if this is what is left in.  That doesn’t mean I dislike it, only that it has the appearance of being rough.  Of course, this apparent roughness doesn’t really indicate that he sent the novel straight from his journal to the editor but is an element of the style; there’s a point in this novel where Duluoz spends time in Berkeley finishing one of his books in self-imposed seclusion, crafting away.  Also, I doubt Kerouac published everything he wrote—he wrote reams—so even the act of selecting texts for publishing is a kind of editing.  I mean to reread this at some point—or at least the first, denser part—but until then I’ll say only that it’s a dramatic change in style from Salinger (or Capote) that eschews control in favour of volubility that is liberating.

J.D. Salinger,

More 1-star reviews on Amazon (I just can’t get enough of this wonderful stuff):

Franny and Zooey was a bad piece of American Literature, December 22, 1998 By A Customer

wHERE SHOULd I start well how about this book sucked. Boys and Girls don’t waste your time. Never once in my reading was I even closed to becoming entertanined. I hated it because it was boring had no point and most importantly wasted my time, and if you read it it will waste your time. J.D.Ss the Catcher in the Raye was a great book read that one. If you have to read this book in school boy it sucks to be you. The only reason I gave this book one star was because that was the lowest grade I could of given it. I would of given this book 1/4 of star because I like the title of the book. Remember don’t waste your time do something else ok

The View of a High School Senior, January 8, 1999 By A Customer

Franny and Zooey was the worst book I have ever read. It is full of pointless dialogue that takes the reader weeks to understand and leaves him completely unsatisfied.

Franny and Zooey is an odd text: the combination of parts (20% Franny, 80% Zooey) is surprisingly uneven given the title (but something that occurs again in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction).  I didn’t realize until I began reading that Zooey is a male name (in the 50s, anyway).  Also, I was at first thinking it would be a Thelma and Louise thing, or Bonnie and Clyde—some kind of partners in crime, and I suppose that’s true (considering “Zooey” is one long conversation between the two), but it’s definitely not a rollicking road novel; if you consider the discussion of  The Way of the Pilgrim (could it be ignored?)  this novel is kind of like a brief stop on the side of the road to look at a spiritual map.

“Franny” (1955) is a good story even on its own, but I don’t feel it’s as good as most of the 9 stories.  It seems to me that the opening is the strongest, but that I have minor criticisms that begin to mount at the restaurant.  In this story (published later than any of the 9 Stories) Salinger doesn’t leave us as much to discover, but that he tells us what we’re just piecing together for ourselves.  (As a completely unrelated example, take 3: 35 from this scene in Dead Man. At that moment, I’m sure lots of watchers thing “hey a nimbus!  I know Christian art and am a genius!”  Unfortunately, at 4: 53 Jarmusch reveals that even a barely literate mercenary could tell you that.)  It’s possible that neither Jarmusch or Salinger is trying to be condescending, though, but trying to gloss obvious things to draw us to more striking observations: by saying “yes, obviously this means this” to some of the more mundane observations, Salinger is indicating that we have to think harder—or he thinks we aren’t as smart as we were when we were reading 9 Stories.  Another question, though: why do things in this story keep happening “literally”?  “Franny literally jumped” when Lane asked her about her book, &c., &c.  In the Dubliners story “The Dead,” when the first sentence explains how Lily was “literally” run off her feet, this is glossed as free indirect discourse: is everything happening “literally” in this story because that’s how Franny speaks?

Even if it wasn’t several times as long, or quite difficult, Zooey (1957) would be a much more difficult text to read simply because of Buddy’s style.  I initially found the formal introduction excruciating, and I still feel that it’s quite indulgent (but I will grant it could be argued necessary for the characterization of Buddy Glass).  Maybe Buddy should update his style: “the general reader will no doubt jump to the heady conclusion that the writer of the letter and I are one and the same person.  Jump he will, and, I’m afraid, jump he should.”  Aarg.  He writes like I imagine self-made Manchester coal barons of 1838 would.  Even allowing that this is the antiquated style of an academic, perhaps it’s not the idiom to adopt for the whole story?  Provided we can blame Buddy for the wild digressiveness of the writing (footnotes, even!) and endure a while, the digressiveness seems to diminish after pg. 90 (the ending of torment punctuated by a very long sentence).

Stylistic criticism aside, though, I don’t have much to say: it’s a difficult text.  I know an absolutely committed atheist who refuses to accept even the vaguest of gods who likes this book, which seems irreconcilable to me.  I don’t know what to take away from it besides an argument for mysticism in spite of having to exist in the world.  It’s hard for me to think original thoughts about it now because I watched a very good lecture (available at iTunes, or simply on Youtube) that discusses the book as a combination of syncretic religious text and a love story.  I think it’s hilarious that young people would read The Catcher in the Rye and then Franny and Zooey and be furious on reading this one.  ’Serves them right for thinking The Catcher in the Rye was about them.

JD Salinger, 9 Stories (1948~1953)

9 Stories contains the following, in this order:

A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948)
Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut (1948)
Just Before the War with the Eskimos (1948)
The Laughing Man (1949)
Down at the Dinghy (1949)
For Esmé – with Love and Squalor (1950)
Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes (1951)
De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period (1952)
Teddy (1953)

I’d like to reiterate that I read this book and wrote the bulk of this review last June.  I’m putting these reviews up in written order, so the coincidence with Salinger’s death is simply that.

So firstly, some Amazon reviews that I think are just insightful as hell; the internet is full of wisdom, and don’t let anything convince you otherwise.

Yuk, Yuk and Double Yuk, June 29, 2000

I absolutely detested all of the stories in this volume! All of them were dreary and gloomy for no particular reason, and after I finished each one, I was still at a loss at to what Salinger was trying to tell me. He gives no reason for his extreme pessimism but simply paints everyone and everything in a very negative light. Salinger is a powerful writer, but compared to the Catcher In The Rye, this book is just garbage.

What’s New?, November 10, 2003

Jason Atkinson (Cedar Rapids, IA USA)

The book Nine Stories, is repetative in its theme’s. There is no sense of digression, only confussion. Each of the stories has a main theme in commom which basically sums up to be around negativity; there is always something happeneing to make the story very dissappointing Or negative. Someone dies, someone gets hurt, something bad happens to affect someone else.

If I was to really summarize these stories as a whole, i would say that it is a very long poem. I love to write poems and i get that feeling from each story.

By	“gsibbery” (Baton Rouge, LA) – See all my reviews

This review is from: Nine Stories (Mass Market Paperback)

What is the opposition between “digression” and “confussion,” I wonder.  If you’re going to spew your idiocy on the internet, at least run it through a spell-checker: I always do.  My reaction to the collection is one spell-checked word:

Fantastic.

I think an important element of good writing is that it is economical even when it is being floral.  Not necessarily Hemingway sparse (or late-Hemingway empty-wilderness parodying Hemingway) but not freighted with metaphors just because of the belief that it would be unartistic to just say something literally.  What I find frustrating about much contemporary writing—certain passages of Obasan come to mind—is a dearth of pointless dead metaphors.  It’s not related, but Mike Phillips’ 2005 review of George and Rue (another Canlit that I mostly enjoyed) in The Guardian describes the presence of “a flood of Faulknerian metaphor” which I think is frustratingly untrue: Faulkner’s metaphors are instructive not just pretty.  In “To Esme, With Love and Squalor,” Mr. X “felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure baggage on an overhead rack.”  This is my example of a good simile because, not only does it exemplify dangerous instability, it also calls us to think of transit, transience, &c; it is not a throwaway linkage just for the sake of intellectual showboating: the simile has particular relevance to the character and the scene.

My favourite—and the one I think mostly recognized as the best—is “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  The beach scene is reminiscent of Tender is the Night, or maybe Death in Venice, although the appearance of the beach isn’t super-remarkable.  It’s an interesting story for the way Seymour starts to fill out without ever saying anything important; he seems to just sleepwalk his way down to the beach.  Actually, maybe that’s the similarity to Tender Is The Night or Death in Venice: everything happening has the surface appearance of levity and play (that’s why Seymour and his new wife went to the beach, after all) but this frivolity is only an illusion.  The first time I read it I was initially irked by the ending: I felt like Seymour’s sudden and quite final surge of activity didn’t fit in with his previous inactivity.  I’ve warmed to it though, not only because it is necessary, but because there was about as much distance between Seymour and the shooter as there could have been.  Anyway, great story.

My next favourite is “To Esme—With Love and Squalor.”  Firstly, the dialogue is hilarious and wonderful (for how it speaks rather than what—something that is true in all these stories).  Most of the conversations are banal.  “For Esmé,” especially, brings these linguistic hilarities to the fore.  She wants to meet under less “extenuating” circumstances?  Her father was “intransically” kind?  Even Microsoft Word AutoCorrect knows the word is intrinsically—although not that Esmé’s garbled word carries hints of intransigent.  It’s more than funny that Esmé doesn’t know what prolific or squalor means: where does “I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact” come from?  It seems to me that she has adopted an odd vocabulary from somewhere: possibly an oral source (since her incorrect words sound similar to what she means).  At 13, she could be imitating the genteel delicate language of her dead parents—“a method of existence that is ridiculous to say the least.”  How precocious.  Finally, it seems to me that, by sending the narrator her father’s watch she is marrying him rather than taking him as an adoptive father.  Ridiculous to say the least.

Children are central in almost all the stories, and (like Naomi in her youth in Obasan) are a convenient device.  In some of the stories, they illustrate almost surreal lack of self-awareness.  Are children really like this?  I don’t feel like that particularly matters. (It’s been argued that Benjy in The Sound and the Fury is a device rather than an accurate representation of someone who is severely disabled.)  On the other hand, there are instances where the children aren’t so unaware.  The Glass children, certainly, are a prime example, and Teddy in the story of the same name, is very similar to the young Seymour who appears a decade later in Hapworth 16, 1924.  That said, Teddy is infinitely more bearable than Seymour will turn out to be.  I think I remember the ending of this story was criticized; I loved it, but I can see how some readers would be shocked by Teddy’s total detachment from the world, where children are supposed to be bouncy and bright-eyed and life-loving.

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” is almost entirely a phone conversation, and only one side of it.  Considering that, the amount that a story can be fleshed out with only half a conversation is remarkable.  “Just Before the War With The Eskimos” has a boy in it who sounds not so different from Holden Caulfield.

For whatever reason, I find myself surprisingly drawn to “Down at the Dinghy” while at the same time feeling that it’s a (relatively) unimportant story (and ranking it at the bottom of the ones I really really adored but above the pretty ones).  Boo Boo is one of the Glass children, and I think this is the about the most prominent role she ever gets.

I don’t have much to say about the remainder of the stories, other than that I remember reading and enjoying them.  There are synopses of all of them at Salinger.org.

Perhaps it’s a structuralist imperative to rank stories, especially when collected.  (If I was to justify ranking them, I think I would do so by claiming that to refuse would be to accept a kind of relativist position where there is no empirical way of judging good and artistic writing, which in turn makes writing sound flighty and unimportant and like not real work; for some people, I suppose, writing is not work.)  Anyway, in my mind I divide the stories into two groups: those I adore (the top 6), and those that I really like:

1. Bananafish
2. For Esmé
3. Teddy
4. Pretty Mouth
5. Just Before the War
6. Down at the Dinghy
7. De Daumier
8. Uncle Wiggily
9. The Laughing Man

At some point I’ll reread all the stories and maybe my reactions will change (though only slightly), but even without having reread any of the stories, six months later I would re-rank them as:

1. Bananafish
2. For Esmé
3. Teddy
4. Down at the Dinghy
5. The Laughing Man
6. Just Before the War
7. Pretty Mouth
8. Uncle Wiggily
9. De Daumier

Turns out that, despite a somewhat negative reaction to “The Laughing Man,” it certainly was memorable to me (perhaps for that reason).  I don’t remember “De Daumler-Smith’s Blue Period” at all.

To summarize, though: this is the best book Salinger ever wrote (stylistically at least).  I was one of the only people in the English-speaking world who never read Catcher in the Rye in high school, it seems, and now that I finally have, I’d still say 9 Stories is better.

Firstly, let me reveal that I am not a literary patriot.  I have read approximately a dozen Canadian novels, and many are among my least favourite books ever.  That said, I recognized that the works I had read were not necessarily representative: most were required reading for a class I didn’t enjoy.  Also, most of them were brand new, without the pillow of years to smother the worst among them.  If you want to avoid reading dreck, it’s best to let books age; of course, that also means you’ll never discover anything.  Dilemma.  Anyway, in a self-conscious attempt to be fair to Canadian literature, I decided to dig up a consecrated Canadian book.  I used the LRC article (which is dominated by non-fiction, unfortunately).

In trying to think of other novels I have read from the early 80s (for the sake of placing it in an artistic context) I can’t think of anything, so I guess this will be my starting point for comparison (for systemizing and historicizing and all those unfashionable processes).

Given my previous experiences, then, I had low expectations for Obasan.  Worst of all for the poor book, the house Joy Kogawa is relatively nearby.  Does that make Obasan regional?  Horror of horrors.  I was drifting through Obasan noncommittally, worrying about how I would judge it (given that we’re both from the same region) until I came upon the following passage from third-to-last paragraph of chapter five:

[Obasan] seems to have forgotten her reason for coming up here.  I notice these days, from time to time, how the present disappears in her mind.  The past hungers for her.  Feasts on her.  And when its feasting is complete?  She will dance and dangle in the dark, like small insect bones, a fearful calligraphy—a dry reminder that once there was life flitting about in the weather.

Gorgeous, thought-provoking, and incredibly violent.  Perhaps it’s reading Faulkner that makes me gravitate toward this bleak view of time; possibly the passage is objectively fantastic.  The “fearful calligraphy” makes me think of the “fearful symmetry” of Blake, except that I understand “fearful calligraphy” more (in spite of the numerous books, movies and songs based on the phrase, including a book by Northrop Frye—who incidentally is one of the Canadian theorists I enjoy and I think on the LRC list (though I don’t think he’s very fashionable)).  Lastly, “flitting about in the weather”?  I would never have expected this last word.  Choose any other word that you would expect in its place, and you would have some flavour of cliche.  I adore the word “weather” here.  Maybe it seems petty to read a whole novel and gush over a single word, but I really think it’s a great phrase.

Unfortunately, this kind of menacingly beautiful passage is an exception to what otherwise seems so ho-hum.  I must be a prude or something for being so uncomfortable with the confessional quality of much of the prose.  I don’t know you Naomi Nakane—why tell me all this?  (At worst I see the distracting digressiveness of my own attempts at writing: not a good thing, unfortunately.)

Also, vast sections of historical detail (are they meant to show the effulgence of Emily’s talk versus the silence of the older generation?) are interesting rather than literary.  The interest is lurid, especially for someone who lives in the region and maybe should feel some guilt for the Japanese internment.  Canadian history doesn’t dwell on McKenzie King as monster.

I also find frustrating the deadness of her Japanese translations: they aren’t wrong, or even bad, and I have little doubt that Kogawa’s Japanese is better than mine, but there is space where she could play with the connotations and linguistic differences more.  Maybe I’m just being elitist in my belief that the ability to understand the romanized Japanese should confer some kind of nuanced understanding upon me, but what’s the purpose of writing it in if a verbatim translation follows immediately?  Placing distance between Obasan and the Canadian-born children, I guess.  Minor criticism.

I would like to help Kogawa for the help with symbolism.  I might be indignant that sometimes it is so obvious as to seem condescending, but at other times it’s nice to be reminded.  The chicken that pecks the chicks to death is white; the chicks are yellow.  Aaaah.  I was fixated on Saturn Devouring His Son (the Goya not Reubens version, which, though infinitely more horrifying, looks to me similar to The Bumble), which probably relates back to the fascination the passage describing how time “feast” on Obasan.  Still, the white chicken vs yellow chicks seems like it’s not enough.  Is it really that simple, or is this a somewhat glib commentary?  I guess I should re-read.

Where Kogawa is most restrained in her efforts to explain everything to us is when Naomi is youngest.  The scene with the chicks pecked to death is made obvious later, but the entire action sequence of the scene is silent except for Naomi’s cry “Mama—.”  Whether Kogawa gets more blunt with her symbolism as the book progresses or not (it seems to me like she does) the compounding of the same symbols over the book would make them more apparent anyway, so I feel that, if anything, the symbols could be increasingly subtle as readers become aware.

***

With six months of hindsight, I remember Obasan as a good start for me in Canlit Appreciation.  If I sound down on it, it’s only because of years of academic reading, where we are largely protected from all but the most famous and perfect of works.  For a student of American literature, my first experiences in Canlit were kind of like emerging from a protective academic cave.  Who knew that real books could be enjoyable too?

Here’s my Mar 2007 reaction to Voltaire’s Bastards. I’m surprised just how angry it is; clearly I should have been using those years to write a followup to Blonde on Blonde.  Oh well.

***

Firstly, if you see John Ralston Saul on the street, throw something at him for me–something medium hard, like tomatoes or other fruit; maybe pie, but put salt in it first to make sure he doesn’t enjoy it. That old crank wasted hour–no, days–of my summer, forcing his pretentious anti-Joycean crankery on me. Because his book irked me so, I wrote about it. Irony? Pshaw. You can mostly ignore the sentences where I’m complimenting the book–I was just trying to placate the henchmen I’m sure he hires to beat up people that reveal his book’s blowfulness.

If Voltaire’s Bastards was half as long, I would rate it twice as highly. [The mathematically inclined might note that the blowfulness of the book increases proportionally with length, and might suggest that this book would do best to be as short as possible: they would be correct]. Up until the second half, the book is crisp; it snaps, crackles, and pops with emotional and common-sense appeal. He explains elegantly the importance of ethics, and how reason by itself doesn’t carry any. (If it weren’t for the fact that he dismisses religion in a glib one-sentence comparison to T.V., Saul could start arguing for a rebirth of faith). Saul’s political arguments about the danger of ceding power to unelected deputies and unaccountable ‘experts’ are real issues. However, it is ironic that the most interesting sections of a book that spends so much of its time railing against expertise are those that focus on history and politics, much of it French (Saul’s specialty). More unfortune, though, is that Saul isn’t done after history and politics. If you relish the thought of reading 300 pages of intellectual showboating, the second half of this book will be a treat for you. Saul is no longer able to restrain his weary crankiness, and the explanations of how economics, visual arts, and literature have all been corrupted, (with help in the form of quotations from Balzac, Bowie (seriously), and just about everyone else) drags because of the Saul’s caustic negativity. Saul’s nostalgia for anytime-but-now continues to grow through the book, and eventually emerges in the form of talk-radio like caricatures. It’s hard to see how the knowledge that Gavrilo Princip was ugly helps anybody, besides perhaps Saul’s ego, and when Saul starts writing about dentists all being tanned and driving sports cars, and accountants being fraudsters as a rule, even a detached reader would be forgiven for thinking “God, fruit off already.” But the best, most incredible part is the hilarious hypocrisy of Saul’s criticism of James Joyce. To say that Saul hates Joyce seems somehow lacking: Saul writes “[in contrast to Joyce,] Ford Madox Ford did not write with anger and hatred against humanity.” Anger and hatred against humanity is the kind of phrase I’d expect to find in a Louisiana Baptist church used to describe Satan. Saul’s over-the-topitude knows no bounds: “Joyce provided the justification for an elitist revolution designed to steal fiction from the people.” (It’s a strange comment from someone who only 400 pages ago complained about doctors who only read “a few formula thrillers”, and then stated that popular success is the measure of good literature, rather than critical success). But the hypocrisy is that Saul, who has written a 600-page book with 30 pages of footnotes, (including numerous sentences where the main text is French and the footnote the translation) is complaining about Joyce being Elitist. It’s impressive that Saul can fit this criticism in between references to Zaharoff and Zola, Petrarch and the patriot missile, but it’s patently dishonest for Saul to set himself up as a people’s champion with this chore of a book–especially since it need not have been so long. A merciful publisher would have printed this book as a “choose your own adventure” novel, where you could read to about the first half, and then leap right to the last ten-or-so pages (you could probably read it like that as is without missing anything too interesting or enlightening anyway). Saul would do well to remind himself of the Voltaire quotation that appears several times in his book: “all styles are good except the boring.”