William J Cobb on books & film

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.

So I realize that Facebook now has over 8.9 billion users and is spicing up the lives of so many by reconnecting them to all those people in high school that Lord knows we should never forget or move on from—Eddy the guy who ‘borrowed’ your cigarette for a puff and returned it all squishy from his mush-lips or Belinda the Beauty Queen who had to move away because of some mystery ailment . . . . But here’s why I really love it: Last weekend a friend came to visit whom we had not seen in over a year. First thing she did upon walking in the house was check her cellphone, something that always brings people closer together, standing there while someone talks to someone else on the cell, or reads her text messages. Second thing she did: Opened her laptop to her Facebook page, showing off new photos of (how’d you guess?) herself and (I’m not kidding here) posts from friends from high school saying, “You look terrific! I’m so jealous!” This person did not stop talking for 24 hours and ignored pretty much all her surroundings except her Facebook page. Which I’m sure enriches her life. Go cyberworld!

The following review appeared in the Dallas Morning News, 1 March 2009. I liked the novel, although the misery level was rather high. I received a condescending email from presumably the author’s agent, complaining that I didn’t gush about the novel enough. That’s rather ridiculous, considering I compared Meyer to Andre Dubus and Dennis Lehane. Plus it’s a tough-guy novel, so complaining I didn’t love it enough seems rather funny. (Meyer was graduated from my alma mater, University of Texas, so I’m simpatico. I don’t blame him for the silly email, either. He probably knew nothing of it.) Three things I didn’t address in the review, or only obliquely, for lack of space: 1) One of the characters wrongly accused of murder is sent to prison when he’s merely charged with the crime, before a grand jury, trial, any of that. Does that ever happen? Usually one goes to county jail before the trial, right? 2) The character who does cause the (accidental) murder does so by throwing a ball bearing and hitting some hobo dude in the head. I’m sure that could happen, but it seems unlikely and implausible, even somewhat goofy. 3) I live part-time in Pennsylvania, and his bleak depiction of it doesn’t ring true from my experience. Still, it’s fiction, a vision of the world, and doesn’t have to be ‘realistic,’ which can be too tedious anyway.
AMERICAN RUST/By Phillipp Meyer/Spiegel & Grau; 368 pages, $24.95
Down and Out in Pennsylvania
With a title like “American Rust” you know right off the bat this is not going to be another chicklit “The Devil Wears Prada,” but rather a peek into that dark underbelly of the American Dream. And yes, it not only peeks, it wallows. Phillipp Meyer’s debut novel features two bad-luck losers fresh out of high school and headed for nowhere: Isaac English, the smart one with literary pretensions; and Billy Poe, the angry one, with ex-football star credentials. Isaac and Billy get involved in the accidental murder of a homeless thug, and the rest of the novel details how they are haunted, punished, and redeemed for this crime. It takes place in the Rust Belt fringe of southeastern Pennsylvania, and is a vision of America in decline, a wasteland populated with angry young boys leading directionless lives.
The first half of the book is a bit lopsided: the murder occurs quickly and is not particularly convincing, but after that the pace slows to establish who these people are, and what’s at stake. Billy is in love with Isaac’s sister, Lee, who has left the downtrodden town of Buell for Yale and marriage to a wealthy yuppie. Isaac is intelligent, but emotionally disturbed. He put off college to stay home with his disabled father, and is now itching to flee. Billy’s father, Virgil, is a shiftless loser, and his long-suffering mother is involved with the police chief, Bud Harris, who managed to keep Billy out of prison on an assault charge in the recent past. Harris comes across as a good man with a soft heart and a flexible sense of justice.
Once the players are established, the story picks up steam. Isaac runs away, ostensibly headed for California, but also to escape criminal charges. While Isaac hops trains as a wannabe hobo, Billy is charged with murder and sent to prison, where he immediately becomes entangled with white supremacists. Billy’s incarceration is a loyalty test: if he would only tell the truth, he would be released, but he won’t implicate his friend. His stoic refusal to snitch gives him dignity, which is what this land of “American Rust” sorely lacks.
Although press material compares the novel to the likes of John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy, those forbears seem rather lofty, and the novel has more in common with TV dramas like “Law and Order” or “The Wire.” The prison scenes are rather standard, but nonetheless compelling, vivid and gritty. In contemporary fiction Meyer most resembles Andre Dubus, Dennis Lehane, or Richard Price. Bleak and nasty. He describes a dilapidated world with flashes of understanding, moments of misdirected animosity, and fistfuls of energy gone wrong.

So part of the charm of having satellite TV is watching films (usually late at night, when I can’t sleep) that I would never see in the theatre, but what the heck. Who made this movie The Strangers, and why? It’s certainly scary and foreboding early on, but like many other ‘torture porn’ flicks, it gradually descends into murder and mayhem that seems seriously pointless. This is (obviously) The Point at the end of the film, after Liv and her feckless husband (who finds a shotgun and a barrel of shells, only to shoot the wrong person) are killed and bloody. I felt sorry for Liv Tyler in that final scene, when she is being slowly, inexorably stabbed to death. The last I saw of her she was wearing Star Trek ears and puppydog eyes in that idiotic The Lord of the Rings. (How that won Best Picture . . . .) I’m sure she’d rather lose her virginity again against the backdrop of gorgeous Italian vistas like in Stealing Beauty. I’m well aware of the old Aristotelian song & dance about tragedy exciting terror and pity, causing a sense of catharsis, and yes, it’s valid. But the couple in The Strangers really aren’t tragic heroes, or are so only loosely. They fit the ordinary yuppies category. The killers are creepy but not particularly diabolical: mainly they walk around slowly in masks. I don’t get the slow-walking killer in movies like Halloween etc. Jeez, I’d just book it out of there. I will give the movie this: I kept wanting to turn it off, but I couldn’t, compelled to watch the mayhem to the end, the final shots of the isolated suburban home on a quiet, hohum morning, with the killers driving away, scotfree.
The Descent, on the other hand, is another horror movie in the torture porn category that is worth watching, if you can stomach it. It features a plucky band of chickflick heroines going caving somewhere in Appalachia. (Admission: I’m a former caver and know something about this sport. There are big caves in Appalachia, so on that point, it’s accurate. However, I’ve never seen that many good looking women dirty in a cave before.) They soon encounter a race of cannibilistic cave people and proceed to fight them tooth and nail. (Like who hasn’t done that before?) Here’s where the torture porn comes in: Some of the footage of the babes being gobbled up by the cannibals is awfully graphic and gruesome. But as horror movies go, it’s pretty good. Predictably one of the babes survives, and when she turns her back on The Competitive Babe and lets the cannibals have her for dinner, it’s morally queasy at best, pretty horrible over all. Both are cycling into the endless repetition of sat TV fare.

So a couple weeks back I was in the desert of West Texas near Big Bend National Park, staying at the house of park ranger Marcos Paredes, who was the model for one of Nevada Barr’s characters in her new novel, Borderline. She’s a best-selling writer who pens mysteries set in national parks. One of her early novels has the same title as Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s famous western, Track of the Cat. (Clark is also the author of The Ox-Bow Incident, made into a good movie with Henry Fonda. Track is a bit like a Western version of Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.)
Marcos is a nice guy who reminds me of the retired air force dude on the old Northern Exposure TV show. He’s built a beautiful and beautifully remote adobe house in the desert (see picture below for his the horses in his ‘front yard’) with a great view of the Chisos Mountains off his gallery and balcony. He’s an avid reader, too: We talked about No Country for Old Men, which takes place in the West Texas desert (specifically a bit east-southeast of there), and I asked, Is it realistic? “Nope. No way,” he said. He said the drug traffic didn’t much come through the Big Bend area, although while I was staying there he did apprehend a fugitive who had engaged in a shootout with border guards a few weeks back. He’s a first-rate birder and we saw Audobon’s Warblers, Vermillion Flycatchers, and Ash-throated Flycatchers from his porch. But here’s his best story: While driving through the park recently he came upon a badger dragging a deer carcass across the road. He stopped to watch it, being fascinated, and the badger (which are short, stocky animals, like a cross between a wolverine and a raccoon) reared up on its hind legs and hissed at him, thinking he was trying to take the deer. He said the last he saw it the badger was dragging the deer over a fence.
Here’s a picture of the horses that came to visit us while we were dinosaur fossil hunting (he has some cool dinosaur fossils).

While doing research on a pandemic angle of a novel I’m writing, I stumbled across two nonfiction books that offer some useful context for the recent outbreak of Swine Flu: John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history (2004) is an excellent and gripping read, recreating the events that led up to the Spanish Flu of 1918. This flu, considered one of the most deadly pandemics in modern history, is now widely believed to be a bird flu strain, but one that appears to have originated on a pig farm in Kansas. Barry offers clear and penetrating analysis of the scientific foundations of epidemiology, and this understanding actually works to allay fears about the present Swine Flu, although create concerns about the future. Our medical industry is vastly superior to that of 1918, when they didn’t understand viruses, didn’t know what they were confronting. Soon the media will be presenting the greater flu scare, and one that has already been labeled The Armageddon Virus by a British doctor, aptly named Dr. John Oxford (I’m not making this up): viruses of similar nature sometimes do combine and create mutations with both properties. In this case, it would be the human-to-human, airborne component of the Swine Flu, which seems to be passed easily, and the high death toll of the bird flu, which, up to this point, is difficult to contract, only through close contact with infected birds. (See BBC online here for his quotes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8023977.stm.) A flu of that makeup would be deadly and easily caught. That will likely be the next worry. Viruses are complex and tricky, and this could be a highly unlikely combination, or a real possibility. 
An even better, grislier, and more shocking disease book is John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (2005), about the bubonic plague of the 14th century in Europe. It’s a horror story in some respects, but here the science is also a bit comforting: The bubonic plague still exists but is considered a relatively easy disease to treat and to handle. Not in the 14th century: Kelly does an especially good job of conjuring up the gruesome reality of Italian towns devastated by the Black Death and the social turmoil it caused, including anti-Semitism and the rise of Flagellants, an extreme Christian sect who traveled from town-to-town whipping themselves bloody.