William J Cobb on books & film

First, a confession: I’m no great fan of M. Night Shymalan’s films. Some of my students think him a “genius” but that seems a bit giddy: The Sixth Sense (1999)  and Signs (2002) are watchable and clever in moments, but The Lady in the Water (2006) was beyond stupid. So I put off watching The Happening (2008) until curiosity got the best of me. It reminded me of a book I’ve mentioned here before, James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia (2006), which is an interesting read, frustrating and contradictory in its own right, but insightful. Lovelock argues that the affects of Global Warming will be like a fever for the planet, and that the super-organism of Gaia will heat up to eliminate and expel humans as a kind of sickness.
He also makes the crucial point that his is not a consciousness at work, or a conscious action, but one of the complexity of life, of its synergy and interconnectedness. The Happening seems to be making a similar point, although clumsily adding a conscious decision on the part of plants to eliminate humans. It’s hard to say exactly, since he couches every answer to the mystery as a theory, but it’s strongly implied. It’s worth watching for the unintentionally laughable dialogue, most of it coming from Mark Wahlberg, who has actually made some good movies, so I blame the director, not the actor: “No, what?” he cried. After hearing about a terrorist attack in Central Park, he says, “Central Park? That’s odd.” And there are others.
As a way to cleanse my video brain, I just had to watch The Big Lebowski (1998) this morning, one of my favorite films ever. Or as The Dude tells Jesus, “Well, yeah, like, that’s your opinion, man.”

So a friend of mine (Yo, Morris) recently sent me this link to a trailer for the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GACx8We7Vo. It looks to be the awesome apocalyptic film of the fall season. That’s a genre rife with laughers and almost-rans, as well as unintentionally funny scenes, such as Charlton Heston pounding the beach before the broken Statue of Liberty (with a bikini-clad babe on horseback behind him) in Planet of the Apes (1968), or crying out “Soylent Green is people!” in Soylent Green (1973). I saw Sean Connery in Zardoz (1974) at the Drive-In, on a high-school date no less: the beach rape scene was not a turn-on, either. Then again there’s Don Johnson in A Boy and His Dog (1975). The apocalyptic films seem to come in clumps, don’t they? The mood of the times. More recently there’s the pretty awful I Am Legend (2007), which had too many ridiculous car-chase scenes and a happy ending that was opposite of the novel’s end—a book weighed down by another stupid vampire plot angle.
 
Which is all to say that The Road may be, for the apocalyptic genre, The Best Ever. I hope so. From the trailer it looks like Charlize made the mother role quite a bit longer than the novel, where she gets a couple paragraphs before she bows out of existence.

So I’ve just returned from a six-day river rafting trip in western Colorado, on the Gunnison River in Big Dominguez Canyon, which my pal Barack has recently approved as a Wilderness Area. Beautiful redrock canyons, great birds: We saw Bullock’s Orioles, Canyon Wrens, Blue Grosbeaks, Scott’s Orioles, Western Kingbirds, Bank Swallows, Bluegray Gnatcatchers, Yellow-Breasted Chats, Bald Eagles, and Peregrine Falcons, among others. Also spotted a beaver, a fox, deer, bighorn sheep, and a lone donkey on a hilltop. The river is mellow enough for my two-year-old, with only Class II rapids. There’s rock art dating back to the Anasazi era and up to 19th century (see photo below).

Our favorite spot was the junction of the Gunnison River and Big Dominguez Creek, where Big Dominguez Canyon meets the river (see photo below). The worst moments included a sea of mud after a thunderstorm and a swarm of ungodly mosquitos.

If I hear another idiotic, brain-dead plug of Twitter from the mass media I’ll be screaming like Robert Downey Jr.’s gay monk character in the trailer for Satan’s Alley (for this little gem, see the opening credits of Tropic Thunder). I’m sure Twitter is no worse than blow driers or mascara, something I don’t use but I’m sure provides a useful function, as it is blah blah blah friggin’ blah. The constant chatter about it falls under the category of What’s Wrong With America. Frank Rich recently reported in his NY Times column a factoid that 60% of Twitter-ites drop it within the first month. Presumably because they have something better to do.
I realize, of course, that I’m writing a blog here, meant to be read by the same people who might follow someone else on Twitter. And being a human who tries to keep up with the world while living in the hinterlands, I love my WiFi access, and read a few excellent blogs (NY Times DotEarth blog is one of my favorites, and sports blogs as guilty pleasures). But the mediaworld plugs Twitter shamelessly, as if it’s the cure for hemorrhoids. With all the problems in the world, they seem to think that another instant-gratification Tweet makes a difference in our lives. God help us.
On a less-disgusted note, I have three wild turkeys living in my yard, who remind me daily to forget the idiocy of Twitter, American Idol, Britian’s Got Talent (groan), and whoever those pathetic losers are named Jon + Kate + 8 sad, soon-to-be-children-of-divorce. We’ve had regular visits from deer and a shaggy, cinnamon-colored black bear.
Plus I’m going river rafting this weekend (Gunnison River) and expect to be serenaded by coyotes and owls.

So I was surprised to see my name on the (on-line version) front page of the NY Times today, quoting a favorable blurb from my review of Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone. Here’s the review in its entirety, published in the Houston Chronicle, 1 February 2009. It’s a good novel, if, at 560 pages, a bit too long-winded at times.

CUTTING FOR STONE/By Abraham Verghese/Knopf; 560 pages, $26.95

Physician Heal Thyself

Abraham Verghese is a nonfiction writer whose books “The Tennis Partner” and “My Own Country” have received critical rave reviews, and now appears his much-anticipated first novel, “Cutting for Stone.” Set primarily in an Ethiopian hospital called Missing (a misprint of “mission”) in the capital of Addis Ababa, it’s a contradiction of sorts—half literary novel, half soap opera, an exhausting and fantastic evocation of the life of a pair of twins whose mother was a nun and father an English surgeon. The twins both grow up to be doctors and become patients in a ground-breaking live organ transplant, performed by their estranged father, which is both the tragic and triumphant end of the novel. Written with a lyrical flair, told through a compassionate first-person point-of-view, and rich with medical insight and information, it’s a novel that transcends its weaknesses and makes for a memorable read.

Spanning the half-century between the boys’ birth in 1954 to the discovery of a lost letter that solves a plot mystery in 2004, the story touches the edges of history. Primarily it’s an indictment of the cruelty and abuse of the reign of Ethiopian dictator Emperor Haile Selassie. As the boys grow up they both come to fall in love with a young African woman named Genet, the love interest of the plot, who is the daughter of a rebel figure, Zemui, and who later becomes an Eritrean rebel herself. Deplorable poverty and vicious dictatorial rule are what these people fight against, and what Marion’s love for Genet makes him an exile.

Here’s an example: At one point Shiva and Marion see the Emperor pass by, and he waves to them graciously. “It was 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated . . . . Of the twenty-six cars at His Majesty’s disposal, twenty were Rolls-Royces. One was a Christmas present from the Queen of England. . . . An old woman waving her paper must have caught the Emperor’s eye. The Rolls stopped. The old woman, bowing, thrust her paper to the window with both hands. She seemed to be speaking. The Emperor was evidently listening. The old woman became more animated, gesturing with her hands, her body rocking, and now we could hear her clearly. The car moved on, but the old lady wasn’t done. She tried to run with the Rolls, fingers on the window. When she couldn’t keep up, she yelled, ‘Leba, leba’—‘Thief, thief.’ She looked around for a stone, finding none, took off her shoe and bounced it off the trunk before anyone could react. I saw only the rise of the policeman’s club and then she was slumped on the ground, like a sack. The palace gates swung shut. The old woman, motionless, nevertheless got a vicious kick to her ribs. . . . These many years later, even though I have witnessed so much violence, that image remains vivid. The unexpected clubbing of the old woman, seconds after the Emperor greeted us so warmly, felt like a betrayal, and with it came the shock of knowing Hema and Ghosh were powerless to help” (200-01).

The mention of Kennedy and the Queen of England underscore the implicit cooperation of Western governments with Haile Selassie’s despotic rule. The novel’s most melodramatic element is its plot, which is supercharged by a series of mysteries, including what dire fate befell their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, in Aden, the less-than-immaculate conception of the twins, the unknown existence of a letter that explains all, not discovered until the last pages of the story, and how and when will the beautiful Genet tear apart the bond of the brothers Marion and Shiva. It’s a bit of a potboiler, full of minor characters who have significant roles in plot twists, and which in part fuels its excessive length and numerous digressions.

Verghese is a doctor, whose previous work described working at an AIDS clinic in Tennessee, and his medical expertise informs and enlivens much of the story. He describes the death of Sister Mary Joseph Praise while giving birth to the twins in lavish and queasy detail—the introductory section of the novel spans 166 pages. After their mother dies, the twins are adopted by two other doctors, Hema and Ghosh. These two doctors become the pillars of their world, and guide them through the pitfalls of Ethiopian history, entanglements with Ethiopian resistance to the Emperor Haile Selassie, and toward a life as surgeons.

All through the novel the twins, Shiva and Marion, are struggling with their cursed history, trying to unravel the mystery of their conception and the abandonment by their father, Thomas Stone. He’s a good man with a troubled past: a dominant father and mother who died of syphilis complications, contracted from her husband. He has an aversion to gynecological issues, which explains how he was unable to save Sister Mary Joseph Praise on her deathbed.

Why did Thomas Stone abandon his sons? How did he and Sister Mary Joseph conceive them? (The old-fashioned way, an easy guess.) Which of the sons will live and which will die? All of these central mysteries are presented early in the novel, and ultimately all are answered, but should not be divulged here.

Contemporary literary comparisons are not easy to peg on Verghese: at times he seems to be reaching for the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, but with a more pragmatic bent. He is of Indian heritage, but does not have the satirical bent of Salman Rushdie. He glorifies doctors to a great extent, but does not possess the irony or levity of John Irving’s sick physician in “The Cider House Rules.” Ultimately, he is a particular hybrid creature, both novelist and physician, and like a mythical beast, has a style and magic all his own.

So I managed to stoop and watch some actual network television last night, with enough commercial breaks to make me want to throw a Christian Bale-like tantrum at the tube, and caught another much ballyhooed glimpse of a grim future titled “Earth 2100.”  It featured sound bites from some excellent writers/scientists, including E.O. Wilson, Eugene Linden, and Jared Diamond, as well as the more marginal James Howard Kunstler. But a serious and thoughtful discussion of looming problems it wasn’t. The cheasiest technique: It used comic-book-style animation of a fictitious character’s life, born in this decade, to chart the various catastrophes portrayed, including global warming, pandemic, immigration wars, and resource depletion. At times this was truly absurd, as when the comic book heroine has a look of anguish on her face as she and her family are being accosted by gunpoint in the Southwest, circa 2070-something. Like much of what the networks do, it dumbed down a complex issue to the point of borderline idiocy and/or unconvincing distortion. It seemed to lean heavily on Kunstler’s vision toward the end, as well, and he’s one of the more alarmist, less-convincing writers on this subject. At times he certainly seems to be milking the fears of a coming ‘apocalypse,’ which puts him in the kook/charlatan camp, along with the Left Behind authors. Of all the talk about ‘collapse,’ read Jared Diamond’s excellent book, Collapse (better than Guns, Germs, and Steel, his other best seller), and it will wash away all the fear-mongering. He makes no doomsday claims himself, and leaves it to the reader to draw the scarier conclusions.

Last Sunday’s New York Times featured an article about A.I. titled “The Future of Artificial Intelligence” (www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html?hpw)  that mentioned Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2006), certainly one of my oddball favorite books. (One disclaimer: It’s too long and I couldn’t finish it, but I’d say most readers of a techno nature will find the first 150 pages most fun.) He makes a host of wild claims in the book, perhaps the most attention-getting being his idea that humans may soon conquer mortality itself by uploading their memories into hardware and in effect then living on after our bodies have failed or have been replaced with newer, prettier parts. It all sounds kooky, but he’s a well-regarded expert in this field, and I think we shouldn’t discount him so easily. Apparently there’s a new documentary film out titled Transcendent Man, which details some of these ideas, and as well Kurzweil has his own film coming out this summer. 
In a nutshell, here’s his argument: Advances and breakthroughs are being made in A.I. at various obscure labs across the country and the world. By 2017 he thinks we’ll have a computer with the reasoning properties of a human brain, and by some time in the not-too-distant future (2045 is one of his dates for momentous change, but some of it occurs earlier), a computer with the power of a billion brains at once. The concept is called Post-Humanism. What seems least convincing about The Singularity Is Near, but most heartening, is his rosy, upbeat attitude. Basically he suggests our coming computer overlords will solve all our problems. It’s a nice change from the downer vision of a near-future of murderous cannibals scavenging the countryside for tidbits of gore and plunder.

So right now I’m into Marcel Theroux’s new novel, Far North, coming out next month. It has much in common with several other post-apocalyptic novels floating in the literary air lately: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake. In all these scenarios environmental mayhem has driven the planet into a steep downward spiral, and in The Road and Far North (Atwood is a little quirkier and more metaphorical), there are slave gangs, random murder, and starvation. What makes Theroux’s book interesting is that it envisions some realistic if dire pronouncements about global warming come to fruition, and causing great hardship and ruin. A few years back (2006) James Lovelock, the eminent British scientist who is perhaps most famous for coining the Gaia hypothesis, published a terrifically gloomy nonfiction book titled The Revenge of Gaia. He sees no hope for staving off dire environmental collapse from global warming, and mocks the upbeat, can-do attitude of Al Gore, among others. (Basically he argues that China and India will lead us all to ruin on their way to jump on the bandwagon of Western-style consumerism.) I actually didn’t find it convincing. At times he comes across as a cranky old cuss being a bit too bleak. But one thing he envisions does make sense: If the lower-latitude nations and landscapes get too hot, people will naturally migrate north into Canada or Siberia, which will then have longer and more productive growing seasons. That’s part of Marcel Theroux’s vision of the world in Far North. It would be easy to say the title should be Far Fetched, but I don’t think so. Lovelock may exaggerate and lack faith in the resourcefulness of humanity, but he also has a brilliant mind that has already foreseen significant developments in these early years of the 21st century. 
Let’s hope he’s wrong.

The following review appeared in the Dallas Morning News, 5 April 2009. The first half of the book is compelling and odd: You know something is up, but aren’t quite sure what it is and or what to foresee coming next. I wasn’t thrilled with the ending but it did make the eerie set-up relevant to the here and now: At first the story and style seemed in the spirit of 19th century American Romantics, like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” The House of the Seven Gables, or Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Right now I’m reviewing Marcel Theroux’s Far North, another post-apocalyptic novel for these gloomy days of The Great Recession.
 
CASTLE/By J. Robert Lennon/Graywolf; 228 pages, $22
Self-Portrait of Guilt
Filmmakers have been quick to seize on the Iraq War as rich material: for instance, last year’s “In the Valley of Elah” features Tommy Lee Jones’s knockout performance as a military father struggling with his son’s death. But the most notable books so far have been nonfiction, a good example being Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” It’s only natural that now novels will attempt to portray this chaotic moment in history, but few will tackle that task with the complexity and eeriness of J. Robert Lennon’s fourth novel, “Castle.”
Constructed like a Chinese box, Lennon nestles story-within-story to mimic the ultimate reality of a labyrinthine Iraqi military interrogation center. At first the novel seems a quaint, neo-Gothic tale of a naïve homebuyer taking possession of a dilapidated fixer-upper in New York State, echoes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe: There’s a preternaturally gloomy forest, an eldritch outcropping of rock, and ultimately, a small-scale castle with a mysterious owner: “In spite of the brilliance of the day, and of the trees’ nascent foliage, I was instantly enveloped in gloom” (68).
In the classic tradition of the unreliable narrator, it quickly becomes apparent that all is not well with the “I.” He seems to have fled some calamity in his life, but makes little mention of it, and when others do, such as his sister, he reacts with paranoia and hostility. His new home has an expanse of land into which he descends, literally and figuratively. Here he encounters a white deer that leads him to the castle, and pursues an elusive forest man with ties to his own past.
Here the novel veers wildly toward the psychological thriller. The owner of the castle appears to be one Dr. Avery Stiles, a disgraced professor of psychology from a nearby SUNY campus. The spooky tone reminiscent of early American Gothic literature vanishes. While the reader becomes a subject of mind games redolent of B.F. Skinner behavior modification experiments, cryptic clues about the suicide-murder of the narrator’s mother and father plop out of the closet. The narrator then reveals his father’s complicity in Dr. Stiles cruel experiments on himself as a boy.
Lastly what may be the narrator’s ‘true identity’ emerges, although in this hall of mirrors, it’s impossible to recognize which reflection is real: Without giving too much away, there’s a fictionalized Abu Ghraib prison scenario, in which the narrator plays a crucial role, and what seems to effect his return to the demented ‘castle’ of his youth. Lennon pulls off a virtuoso performance with this convoluted structure, and like the best thrillers, you can’t put it down. Clever and insightful, it compels the reader to solve a series of riddles that reveal the emotional rationale underpinning our most despicable behavior.

After watching the big-budget drivel that is A Night at the Museum you can’t blame Ben Stiller for wanting to do a film like Tropic Thunder, which seems underrated because only two things from this movie got much press: 1) the protests about his comedic use of ‘The Full Retard’ and 2) Tom Cruise as a fat studio executive. I can see why both issues got attention. Ben’s faux film Simple Jack turns out to be fairly important to the plot and has its funny moments. Personally, sure, ‘retard’ jokes are a danger zone, certainly when it seems it’s the privileged movie star making fun of disadvantaged folk. Then again, it’s not meant to be taken seriously. (His hilarious turn at the Oscars, making fun of Joaquin Phoenix, was better, one movie star making fun of another movie star.) Tom Cruise starts off as a profane caricature but gets better as the movie goes on, and his Devil Dance is both weird and funny. He seemed to be making fun of himself as well, which he should get points for. One of the odd things about this faux-Nam movie is at times it looked too realistic, like it almost wanted to be another Apocalypse Now. Apocalpyse Now Comix, maybe, instead of Redux. It’s worth seeing for some of Jack Black’s (who irritates me to no end, usually, but here he was good) moments as the fat junkie star in the jungle and Ben Stiller’s throwing the baby at the end. Or Nick Nolte as a gravelly-voiced Nam vet who never went to Nam. Or Matthew McConaughey’s hair.