William J Cobb on books & film

So this morning the NY Times reports that an amateur astronomer discovered what appears to be an impact spot on Jupiter that’s the size of the Earth. Check it out here: thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/amateur-astronomer-finds-new-earth-size-impact-mark-on-jupiter/?hp
At first I puzzled over what could be the cataclysm in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, brushing off the fuzzy-thinkers who said “It doesn’t matter.” I thought maybe a meteor/comet, but the details are rather sketchy—basically a series of bright flashes in the sky. A student of mine repeated my suspicion, and as we discussed it, I became convinced. (Nuclear war doesn’t fit; there’s no fallout described in the aftershock.) Later I heard McCarthy admitted that it was an impact.
Being an inveterate Discovery Channel watcher and lover of loopy meteor/comet theories, such as the one that posits an impact event 12,900 years ago wiped out the Clovis Culture in North America, I think it’s a great use of science with a soft touch. McCarthy didn’t have to get all Michael Crichton about it, just a few details and then launch the human and philosophical drama. Not to mention the cannibals, to boot.

As a writer it’s easy to kvetch and snipe about other writers and the failings of their books, and especially what makes up the Bestseller List, which often seems like crap in one form on another: For a funny take on this see the review in yesterday’s NY Times (www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/books/13maslin.html?hpw) of a new novel titled How I Became a Famous Novelist, which sounds fun, though I doubt I’ll have the patience to stick with an entire book of it. There are immensely popular genres that make me cringe, including zombies, vampires, crackpot ‘symbolist’ mysteries, and anything to do with magical British children and their ‘dumbledore’ adventures. But I begrudge them nothing. For all the fans of that stuff, good for you. I’d rather people read a fantasy than no book at all. And when writers carp about the success of other writers, it always seems like sour grapes, envy, or “misdirected animosity,” to (badly) quote Charles Bukowski in Barfly.
What I like best is when a new book comes out that makes me excited. That’s a good way to wash away any negativity. And soon we’re going to have a treat: a new Pete Dexter novel is, as they say, “Coming Soon!”
Here’s my take: Pete Dexter is no less than one of the knockout writers of his time, having written two novels that make it to the rarified realm of ‘classics’: Paris Trout (1988), a hardbitten vision of what’s (been) wrong with The South, and Deadwood (1986), a hardbitten vision of a raunchy and funny Old West. Plus all of his novels are good. The ending of Brotherly Love (1993) has one of the best mobster moments I can remember reading, way better than Mario Puzo’s Godfather. Recently I reread The Paperboy (1995), a newspaper-biz novel with an undercurrent of deviant sexuality. His last novel was Train (2004), not his best, but still pretty good. This fall comes Spooner (pub date listed as September), which I’m reading and liking right now. (Note: I was sent an Advance Reader’s Copy, which used to be known as ‘galleys,’ and is what book reviewer’s tend to get to read and time the reviews appearance with the final hardback release date to bookstores.) The advance copy features a quirky, oddball author’s note. I’ll share an excerpt:
“As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There are many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life, and I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have it any other way. 
“All to say that what you have here, while not exactly a first draft, is further away from the finished product than most advance readers’ editions are, and when you come across sentences you don’t particularly like, keep in mind that I probably didn’t like them either. On the odd chance that the bad sentences are still there when the book comes out, then you should keep in mind that you’re reading somebody who is still missing 18 months of the last 36, and has no idea about 2006 at all.”—Pete Dexter
So far what I’ve read is a funny, picaresque novel about an unlikely hero’s birth and early years in Georgia.

Here’s the link to my review of Marcel Theroux’s novel, Far North, published today in the Dallas Morning News:  http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-bk_farnorth_0705gd.ART.State.Edition1.4bb28ee.html

So like all good Americans I spent the 4th of July chopping wood for winter and taping my two-year-old capering about in my backyard, wearing a bucket on her head and swinging in the hammock, crying, “Higher, please!” Later I tuned the tube to a (seemingly, to me at least) obscure film called Margot at the Wedding (2007), starring Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as sisters no less. 
This ain’t Will Smith in Independence Day, that’s for sure. Replace the diabolical aliens with screwed-up humans who fear themselves rather than E.T.
It’s surprisingly good, especially considering Nicole’s character is a writer: ugh, nothing worse than writers. As characters at least. They tend to be done so unrealistically and clumsily that it’s laughable. Though the exceptions are always worth it: the frosty children’s book writer in Burn After Reading, the nebbishy loser Miles in Sideways, and now Nicole as “Margot,” who seems very much the contemporary version of the neurotic writer, the falling-apart-slowly kind, the hurting-everyone-nearby kind. The tree climbing scene is worth the whole movie. Plus Jack Black as an artist: I still cringe when I see this guy, but he’s making some good movies. He plays Jennifer Jason Leigh’s pathetic, feckless fiance. Noah Baumbach is the writer/director, and he also made another good movie about creepy writers in New York (throw a rock and you’ll hit one), The Squid and the Whale.
With all the crap filling up the airwaves, like Paul Blart: Mall Cop and its ilk, this is worth seeing. “But it’s so depressing!” say my students. Well, true. But it’s also funny. Depressing and funny trumps stupid.

So the threat of environmental mayhem is real and disturbing, from Nicholas Kristof’s article in the NY Times about genital mutations to both animals and humans caused by chemicals in our drinking water to reports that M.I.T.’s climatologists have bumped up their prediction of global warming by the end of the century from 4 to 9 degrees. Here in Custer County we have a plague of wasps. Yellow jackets, I believe. There must be millions of them: It seems every house in the county is under siege by these pesky wasps buzzing around our houses, doors, windows, trying to get in, stinging when they aren’t dispatched quickly enough. I’m killing a dozen a day and not even trying. It’s kind of freaky. The seriously dopey The Happening opens with a class of highschool kids (seriously dopey doubletime) discussing the disappearance of Bees. Well I don’t know about the bees (actually, we have a lot of them, too), but the wasps are here. I’ve lived here now for my eighth summer, and this is the first time I remember any wasps. It’s like The Birds, only much smaller, with no Tippi Hedren to go all hysterical on us.

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.