Book Review & Analysis: Democracy by Joan Didion

Democracy

by Joan Didion

      The lifestyles of the rich and well connected aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Take it from Joan Didion, the author who reveals how mundane people actually are by stripping away all the explanatory psychology and decorative frills that go along with literature. Her novel Democracy is about a political family that lives in the public eye. But when it comes to understanding them, the political life is little more than some details in the background.

Joan Didion herself speaks directly to the audience as the narrator in the first person. Her literary persona is immediately collapsed since her role as narrator is the same role she plays in life. Joan Didion was a journalist and as a journalist she plays the part of covering the protagonist, Inez Victor, writing articles about her for magazines and then piecing them together to form this novel which traces her life up to 1975. This postmodernist style isn’t any different from the fragmentary and non-linear style of Didion’s other novels. Along the way, the narrator provides a meta-narration, commenting on how a work of fiction is written and how choices in descriptive language are used to communicate emotions and information about characters and situations. In this way, Didion doesn’t break through the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly; there is no fourth wall to begin with.

Inez grows up in Hawaii with her sister Janet. Both of them marry into powerful families. Inez marries Harry Victor and Janet marries Dick Ziegler. The Zieglers are wealthy and well-connected members of the business class in Hawaii. And Harry Victor is a rising star in the Democratic party. His involvement catapults him into the Senate and in 1972 he runs in the Democratic primaries for president but loses. Because of this, Inez, who bears a passing resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, is a glamorous socialite in the public eye. In her home life, Inez is a mother of two.

There is a darker undercurrent to her marriage though. During her younger days, she falls in love with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent and arms trafficker. Throughout their lives they admire each other from a distance. But during a family vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia the two run into each other. The family vacation coincides with anti-American riots breaking out in Jakarta, mirroring the point where Inez and Harry begin losing interest in each other. Jack Lovett helps the family to escape to a cabin in the mountains outside Bandung and while there, Inez and Jack rekindle their interest in each other.

Jack Lovett subsequently gets deeply involved in espionage activities as the Vietnam War escalates and Harry Victor runs his presidential campaign on an anti-war ticket, similar to George McGovern who, as we now know, also lost the election, unfortunately giving Nixon another term in office. Inez’s heart is torn between an anti-war politician and a CIA agent with no political or ideological affiliation. This symbolizes her weak identity and it is something that her persona, fed to the public by the media, in incapable of seeing.

The relationship between Inez and Jack comes to the forefront of the novel when Inez’s father kills Janet and a Hawaiian man in her home. After the murder, the Ziegler family gather for dinner. During the meal, Jack Lovett walks in and from there he reconnects with Inez. The murder is the turning point where Inez and Harry’s shaky relationship falls apart, revealing it to be more a marriage for the public eye as opposed to one of domesticity. As Inez’s sister dies in the hospital, it is Jack who is there for her emotional support.

Other details get revealed through the murder. One is that Janet might have been cheating on her husband and the affair complicates the relationship between the Ziegler family and the established political and economic order of Hawaii. The Hawaiian man killed by Inez and Janet’s father is tied to a powerful Hawaiian family who were about to close a deal selling low-grade swamp land to the Ziegler family for development. Because of the murder, the deal will fall through. Jack Lovett is connected with all this because his arms dealing is somehow tied in with the Ziegler family’s businesses. But all of these interconnections are murky and not fully explained. The whole mess serves to underline the disconnection between Inez’s family and the Zieglers who are all white settlers and intruders in the Hawaiian islands. The theme of disconnection among the wealthy elite is a theme that runs throughout the novel.

Another theme that gets brought into the foreground because of the murder is the dysfunctional relationship between the parents and children in the Victor family. The son Adlai, no doubt named after Adlai Stevenson though I’m not sure why, is an underachieving student who is getting involved in the anti-war movement on his campus. The daughter Jessie works in a fast food restaurant in Seattle after a suicide attempt. She has just gotten out of rehab for heroin addiction. When Harry Victor arrives in Seattle to take his kids to Hawaii for Janet’s funeral, Jessie decides on a whim to move to Vietnam. Her motivations aren’t clear, but she seems hungry for excitement and hasn’t put any thought into her decision.

After arriving in Vietnam, Jessie gets a job as a cocktail waitress in a country club for Westerners just as the embassies begin evacuating all Americans from Vietnam due to their losing the war. Jack Lovett flies to Vietnam to retrieve her, using his CIA connections to find her and transport her out, utilizing a string of secret military bases in the South Pacific and eventually leaving her in Hawaii. Soon after, Jack Lovett dies in the swimming pool of the hotel in Jakarta where he mysteruously met up with Inez and her family while they were on vacation several years before. The important part of Jessie’s naive escapade is that she would have gotten stuck in the danger zone of post-war Vietnam if the Victor family didn’t have connections in the CIA through Jack Lovett. Jessie most likely would have been imprisoned or executed as North and South Vietnam reunited under the communist government.

The murder also brings one other issue out into the open in the character of Billy Dillon, a man whose job it is to manage the public personae of the Victor family. He works behind the scenes to advise the Victors on what to say in order to minimize controversy and maximize their positive public image. When Inez’s father commits murder, Billy Dillon is called in to first help negotiate a lenient sentence with the Hawaiian judiciary and second to control messaging in the media to cut down on the perceived severity of the crime. Didion demonstrates the efficacy of this in the text by making it unclear why the killing happened and what it meant to the killer. There is a direct connection between the first person meta-narrative of Joan Didion, who explains her literary technique in the course of telling the story, and Billy Dillon who uses the same semantic tricks to manipulate a receptive audience’s perceptions. Billy Dillon again carries the theme of disconnection since he symbolizes the fracture between media image and the private life reality of the Victors. On a private level he is even further a representative of disconnection because he is secretly in love with Inez even though she appears not to be aware of it.

Inez, in the end, drops out of American society. She only becomes her true self after the failure of her marriage and the death of Jack Lovett. She can no longer depend on others, especially men, to support her. Her epiphany comes when Jessie runs away to Vietnam and Inez’s privilege is used to rescue her. This is paired in the story with televised media images of Vietnamese refugees desperately clinging onto American helicopters as they lifet off from military bases. It is important that these images are shown on TV since this demonstrates how cut off Inez is from the real world. She only knows about the refugees through the news media, just as the public only knows her through the same channel. The refugees don’t have the luxuty of being rescued by their own personal secret agents. They have to risk their lives en masse to even have a hope for survival. And Jessie simply gets rescued because her family has powerful connections. This drives Inez to find self-actualization by running a refugee resettlement program from a mosquito-ridden bungalow in Kuala Lumpur. She abandons her life of wealth, privilege, and fame and finds herself by saving the Southeast Asian people without privilege, wealth, or connections who are becoming displaced from their homelands and way of life. Inez ends up being no longer disconnected, no longer living an empty domestic life, and feeling fulfilled and integrated by using what privilege she has to benefit others.

This novel is not exactly a political drama. In fact, the political drama mostly happens in the background and only emerges into the main narrative at certain points. It is really about how mundane the problems of an elite ruling class actually are. Being wealthy and connected, they have powerful mechanisms to help them manage their dysfunctional relationships, but these mechanisms fracture them as human beings. Incapable of knowing themselves, they become vapid, empty husks without any true purpose. Inez and her familial relations are socially disconnected from the state of Hawaii they have chosen, as intruders, as a place of settlement. Inez is disconnected from her public media persona which is managed by Billy Dillon. She is disconnected from her husband and family. She is also disconnected from Jack Lovett who she loves, but only at a distance. She has no sense of identity because she lives through other people who have only fragmentary ties to her. It is only when she clears away all the debris of her social life and media image that she can begin to relate to herself as herself. If this isn’t a simplified version of Hegelian philosophy, I don’t know what is. The political sides of the story are like shadows in the background, partially shaped by the Victor and Ziegler family relations. The background politics are distorted shapes and only vaguely connected to them. The real politics are those internal to the nuclear and extended families. And their problems aren’t any different from the kinds of problems families outside the ruling elite have on a regular basis.

Stripped of all the political noise, this familial drama is basically a soap opera. It’s a surface level plot with superficial twists about people without much depth. Even more so, it is a soap opera because where else would you find such WASPish rich people with names like Dick Ziegler, Harry Victor, or Jack Lovett? They are such wonderbread bland characters that even the name Inez sounds exotic in comparison. Even the tropical location of Hawaii does nothing to enhance their character. This novel could be set in Ohio, Nebraska, or Iowa and it wouldn’t make a difference. Like all of Joan Didion’s novels, this one takes place almost entirely on the surface, but the interplay of those surfaces reveals something about the hidden truths of the people inhabiting a Didion world. A lot of times the hidden space that gets revealed is filled with little more than emptiness. Until the end of the story, this is true of Inez.

Democracy is the type of novel that needs to be read more than once if you want to pick up on all the subtle nuances. It is also the type of novel that needs to be thought about after you’ve finished reading it. Although its simple plot isn’t hard to follow, it was difficult to connect with during while reading. After finishing and allowing for some distance, it was easier to piece all the fragments together into a whole for clarity so that its themes could be considered. This might be a frustrating process for readers who wish to be spoon fed information with clear explanations. This is too bad because if you take a step back and allow the pieces to fall into place, it makes for a challenging but provocative novel. This isn’t Joan Didion’s best work, but it is good enough and certainly deserves a second reading.

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

      She always runs away. She always leaves. This is the observation made by Warren, the ex-husband of Charlotte Douglas who is the protagonist of Joan Didion’s third novel A Book of Common Prayer. Following up on her two previous novels, ones in which the female protagonists suffer because they refuse to take command of their lives, Didion takes a turn in the opposite direction here. Maybe you can say that Charlotte doesn’t end up any better off because of her decisiveness. In fact she gets killed at the beginning of the novel whereas the wives in Run River and Play It As It Lays both survive, albeit under unenviable circumstances.

The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is an obvious stand-in for Joan Didion. She lives in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande where she is connected directly to the government due to her ex-husband’s ownership of a palm oil plantation which happens to be the biggest business in the tiny country. Grace is a former anthropologist who abandons her career because she can never understand human motivations even though she has a sharp perception of human behavior. She changes to a biologist mid-career since organic molecules are easier to understand. They have no subjectivity and only respond to stimuli. This is a clear explanation of Didion’s literary style; in a truly postmodern sense, all her writings concern interactions between surface appearances as opposed to depth and inner meaning. As such, Grace bears witness to Charlotte’s life and death without examining her subjective mind. Yet despite this avoidance of explanation, meaning does emerge in the patterns of Charlotte’s behavior.

During one of the frequent revolutionary coups that make Boca Grande’s politics and economy so unstable, Charlotte gets gunned down on the street. The killing is used as an internal narrative frame. The content of Charlotte’s life up until the time of her death is the content of most of the novel.

A second narrative frame is introduced just after the killing at the beginning and closes at the end of the book after the story of Charlotte’s life finishes. This tells the story of Charlotte’s daughter Marin. This introduction of a second framing device that ends outside the parameters of the first framing device is one way that Didion creates a decentered narrative, one that makes the story feel fractured as though it is falling apart rather than coming together. The non-linear narrative that jumps around between different places and times in seemingly random order, along with reoccurring lines of dialog and thought echoing and repeating throughout the text, heighten the confusion and disorganization. It’s like the pieces of the novel are painted onto glass panels that have been shattered and you follow the story by examining each one and trying to imagine how they once all fit together. This is a good example of how a narrative structure can reflect the theme of its subject.

Marin’s presence is absent from the initial passage that introduces her character when Charlotte meets with her husband Leonard and her ex-husband, also Marin’s father, Warren in her house in San Francisco. The FBI is there because they are looking for Marin due to the daughter’s involvement in a terrorist bombing in San Francisco followed by the hijacking and destruction of an airplane in Utah. Marin has gone underground and disappeared, although it is likely Leonard knows where she is all along. Leonard is a lawyer in high standing with revolutionaries because of his dedication to defending Leftist activist groups in court. He has deep ties to revolutionary factions in Latin America. Or does he actually work for the CIA?

The ex-husband Warren, on the other hand, is the worst possible husband. A professor of English literature from New Orleans, he is obnoxious, mean, racist, manipulative, and violent. Chronically drunk, he has a nasty habit of slapping and punching women who don’t cooperate with him. He is the kind of guy who would never have survived the #MeToo movement. But Warren understands Charlotte more than anybody else in the novel. He may not have any insight into her psyche, but he does know one thing Charlotte always does: run away. As we learn more about their marriage, it is clear that he gave her good reason to run away. But he also recognizes that running away is her habitual reaction to any situation she finds herself in. That is why he has an ulterior motive in coming to San Francisco. He wants to reconnect with Charlotte and coaxes her to visit him in New Orleans to see his brother. Warren claims his brother is dying of cancer, but in actuality it is Warren who is dying of cancer. Of course Charlotte goes. Warren knows she will run away from her absentee husband Leonard. She is easy prey and he wants one last fling before he dies. The result is a predictable disaster.

Charlotte ends up in Boca Grande where she makes an effort to be sociable with everyone although she stands out and never fits in any where. It is here that she meets the narrator Grace who befriends her, protects her, and tries to understand her. That task is not easy. Charlotte spends her days at the coffee shop in the airport, believing that her daughter Marin will be arriving by plane even though she never does. Some well-connected people think she is a CIA agent since the embassy alerted them to her presence and warned that she is of protected status by unofficial US law. She also reads propaganda pamphlets distributed by the CIA and makes late night phone calls to San Francisco for Northern California weather reports. The police think these are coded messages although we never find out what they are all about. She is also friendly with a group of Leftist activists that arrive from the USA and other parts of Latin America. Yet Grace observes that she has no understanding of what any of these people are up to. Grace’s most important observation is that Charlotte lives in the mental space of how she wants the world to be which is distinctly cut off from the way the world really is.

As rumors of a coup circulate, Charlotte’s husband Leonard arrives in Boca Grande to convince her to leave before the revolution breaks out. But he fails since Charlotte has decided to stop running away from life and stay where she is, working in a medical clinic that serves the people of Boca Grande. As all Americans are evacuated from the country, Charlotte stays and continues going to work even though a bomb has gone off at the clinic. She insists she is politically neutral in any situation whatsoever and is oblivious to the danger surrounding her. All that remains of her life at this point is the stubborn refusal to not run away anymore. And that is how she gets shot dead in the street. It’s probable that the revolutionaries kill her because they think she is an intelligence agent. Whether or not this is true is unclear, but in this case perceptions matter more than reality. Grace offers no explanation for any of her of this, but as a reader I conclude that Charlotte lived an uninformed life, relying on her instincts alone and in the end her instincts failed. She couldn’t hold her life together and her intuition didn’t save her when it should have.

As for the political situation, Charlotte doesn’t understand it and she doesn’t want to understand it. Neither does anyone else. The coup in Boca Grande is never explained because it doesn’t serve any definite purpose. It’s led by a bunch of bored young people and gets put down by another counter-revolutionary army of bored young people. All these bored young people are attached to the wealthy family that rules Boca Grande. Mixed up in this guerilla warfare are a bunch of American kids and Leonard, the lawyer who got rich by defending political activists in court. None of these people have a coherent ideology. They just have nothing better to do with themselves. Joan Didion, the lifelong Republican, had a low opinion of the American counter culture. If you’ve read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” you’ll know what I mean.

After fleeing Boca Grande and returning to the United States, Grace tracks down Charlotte’s daughter Marin who is hiding in a safehouse for activists in Buffalo, New York. Sullen and defensive, the young terrorist refuses to discuss her parents, Charlotte and Warren. After learning both of them are dead, she reacts by spewing out rhetoric about the revolution and the defeat of the bourgeoisie. Her rhetoric is a protective armor, sheltering her from the troubles of the outside world by escaping into fantasies about guerilla warfare. When Grace pierces this armor, Marin breaks down in tears. What is revealed is the disconnection between her and her parents who never provided her with the emotional support she needed. The implication is that Warren abused her and Charlotte ran away from her. Most likely, Marin found the support she craved in the politics of Leonard, Charlotte’s second husband, and the activist movements he associates with.

This novel is Joan Didion at her best. She builds on the fractured narrative style of her previous two novels simply by adding in more thematic elements and layers. This is also accomplished by using the first person narrative of Grace as a metanarrative that explains the author’s intentions. Grace’s function is to show without telling. She offers almost no explanations of what happens and allows room for the reader to piece everything together for themselves. The story is all on the surface, but the fragments of the story all point the reader in the direction of its meaning. Grace gives up on anthropology because she can’t understand human motivations. She sees only patterns of behavior and tells the story in this way. She becomes a biologist because she can understand why molecules interact they way they do and, again, she writes about human behavior in this way. Mid-novel she begins using metaphors derived from molecular biology to describe the behavior of the characters. But it is through the reader’s observation of behavioral patterns, how some patterns repeat and then get shattered from outside interference, that explanatory motivations reveal themselves. Grace’s narrative doesn’t tell us what Charlotte’s or Marin’s motivations are, but she does point your attention in the right direction and lets you draw the conclusions. This is a successful way of writing about surfaces so the reader can see through the cracks at what lies underneath. This is showing without telling.

After finishing A Book of Common Prayer it may be obvious that Joan Didion wrote the same kind of book over and over again. Her stories are all about a shallow woman who lives by her wits and instincts alone. She has trouble making decisions and gets tossed around by unseen forces that are remote and yet more powerful than she is. She sees the world solely from her own flawed point of view. And to what extent is Joan Didion writing from an autobiographical perspective? I don’t know. Her novels are without heroes, but maybe there is some kind of strength in their weaknesses. But I do know you might be tempted to cast a critical eye of judgment on her characters. Then the question remains: aren’t her characters a lot more like us than we would like to admit? By reading her novels, aren’t we looking at ourselves in the shards of shattered mirrors whether we like it or not? How many of us truly understand ourselves or the world we live in? Maybe she’s telling us to be more cautious in our approach to other human beings.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

 

Play It As It Lays

by Joan Didion

      There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20^th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow.

Book Review & Analysis: Run River by Joan Didion

Run River

by Joan Didion

      Anybody familiar with popular culture in America knows about the Western genre in film and literature. Westward expansion in the 19^th century is a reality that is baked into the collective American psyche, for better or worse. The Western genre in entertainment and art uses that as a template for the exploration of themes dealing with the American identity including enterprise, personal responsibility, individuality, freedom, and justice. And guns. Somewhere in the space between the historical westward expansion and the storytelling fantasies that originated in journalistic sensationalism, penny dreadful newspapers, and pulp novels, to films as far back as the silent movie era there is a gap that has been overlooked by purveyors of high and low art. That gap is the less romanticized portrayal of what happened after the westward moving pilgrims settled, particularly those that settled in California. One author that did explore that gap is John Steinbeck. Another is Joan Didion and her first novel, Run River, picks up exactly where John Steinbeck left off.

The connection between Didion and Steinbeck isn’t tenuous; Didion makes sure you get it with direct references thrown right in your face. She mentions the novel In Dubious Battle by name and the land owner Everett McClellan speaks with contempt to his wife Lily about the Okie migrant workers camped out on the edge of their farm. It’s a direct reference to The Grapes of Wrath in which we see the downtrodden fruit pickers from an outsider’s point of view. Lily, whose maiden name is Knight, comes from a lineage of settlers in the Sacramento Valley just like her husband McClellan. The reference to Steinbeck’s East of Eden is just a little too obvious as if Didion is begging you to compare her to that legendary American author. Didion, in a further possible reference to East of Eden, even has an Asian caretaker raising her children who are otherwise almost absent from her life. It’s the kind of stunt a young author pulls in their first novel. These ancestral lines of the Knights and McClellans are important because when Lily’s father, an ex-congressman, dies and the married couple’s connection to their families’ past begins to fade, we see how uprooted they actually are in their time and place.

Lily and Everett live empty lives. Lily is a slut. And she’s shallow. There is no point to saying this in a delicate way. It’s just how she is. She’s easy to get into bed. It’s not that she’s excessively horny or indulgent in her sexuality. It’s just that she has nothing better to do with her life. She has enough money to live comfortably and doesn’t have a strong enough mind to occupy herself with the kinds of intellectual pursuits that would build character. She’s just an emoty dress that gets passed around like a jug of ripple wine at a campfire. There is a profound irony here. Lily isn’t shallow because she isn’t a well-drawn character. Didion is a much better writer than that. Lily is shallow because Didion is a good writer. She creates a shallow protagonist through complexity in her prose. The writing is anything but shallow. In fact, you could say the prose is a little too complex for what Didion is trying to achieve. But it does work well enough to get you inside the empty mind of Lily.

Everett himself isn’t much better. He is a dull person, devoid of intellect or emotion. As a father, he manages the family the way a foreman might run a factory that makes products like toothbrushes or shoelaces, things that he has no emotional investment in. He is a family provider but one that is so emotionally distant from his wife and children that he is little more than an anchor or a hitching post for them. We do learn through the course of the novel that he does feel things like jealousy, shame, guilt, and anger, but he is so cut off from his own emotions that we don’t realize this until he expresses them with his gun.

The novel starts with a gunshot as heard by Lilly as she sits fretting in her bedroom. We don’t learn who got shot until the end of the story. The man who does get shot near the beginning is Ryder Channing. I’d expect anybody with a name like Ryder Channing to be from California, or at least to be a character in a soap opera set in California. I’m just sayin’. Everett murders Channing after catching him having a romp in the bushes by the river with Lilly. Throughout most of the story, even though Everett is emotionally dead, he doesn’t show any signs of being homicidal. So here the plot is set in place to be about how Everett came to the point of murdering this man. It almost starts with the feeling of a murder mystery albeit one in which the mystery is not who committed the murder but why did so.

Ryder Channing sees himself as a visionary entrepreneur. He schemes up big plans for business ventures that are guaranteed for success. Of course, all he needs to get started is money...other peoples’ money to be exact. His sales pitches are successful and he attracts a lot of investors and women too. But his businesses never succeed in getting off the ground and he maintains his luxurious lifestyle by skimming off the investments. Ryder isn’t exactly a grifter; it’s just that he is immature and not very responsible.

Ryder Channing has designs on Martha McClellan, Everett’s sister. The McClellan siblings have a curious relationship. There are heavy suggestions of an incestuous attachment. If the two haven’t actually slept with each other, there certainly is a desire between them that hangs heavy over the narrative. Martha is insanely jealous of Lily which is complicated by the detail that the two women both live in the McClellan mansion near the bank of the Sacramento River. They manage to get along though, especially because the children have a good relationship with Martha in the absence of Lily’s emotional support. As the story progresses though, Martha’s behavior becomes erratic and unpredictable. When she drowns in the river, we can’t be certain if it is a suicide or not. Martha is in the middle of all this because she had been planning to marry Ryder Channing, but the arrangements were called off partly because Everett didn’t approve of the marriage. Considering that Ryder and Lily were growing closer to having an affair before Martha’s death, it is easy to see how the history between the two men climaxes with Everett shooting Ryder after he discovers him post-coitus with Lily on the river bank.

After the suspicious death of Martha, Everett is driven further into despair because a powerful development corporation is planning to buy the Knight and McClellan properties. The intention is to turn the inherited agricultural land into suburban housing tracts. The businessmen are like turkey vultures circling the shack of a nearly dead man. This element of capitalist predation even further represents separation from the weakening ancestral roots put down by Lily and Everett’s families. Even worse, Ryder and others who live nearby are in on this real estate scheme because the pursuit of money means more to them than quality of life. This all builds up to the ending gunshot Lily hears in the first sentence of the novel.

All the pieces fit together making a clear and coherent picture. Unfortunately, the prose doesn’t do it justice. Didion’s writing is choppy and stilted a lot of the time. It doesn’t flow as it should. Some of the run-on sentences go on so long that it becomes difficult to follow what she is saying. At other times, the prose is difficult to pay attention to. It is the kind of writing that makes more sense after you finish reading it than during the reading process.

Another shortcoming is her use of the river as a metaphor. The river is a source of life for the farming community that lives on its banks. They obviously settled there because they needed water for irrigation. It is also a place of death since so many people die in or near the river during the course of the narrative. Also it represents a line of demarcation that cuts the communities off from the world outside the valley. This is especially important as a line that separates the people migrating from the east from those that stopped migrating and settled on the western bank. But a river is supposed to flow and the stream of ancestry that leads up to the marriage of Lily and Everett comes to a dead halt as their lives and relationship reaches the end. But Didion doesn’t emphasize the metaphor of the river with the strength she could have. Its meaning is obscure and should have been developed further to completion.

Like Finnegans Wake, Run River begins where it ends and ends where it begins, occupying a limbo between fantasies of the Old West and more contemporary fantasies of California as the land where dreams come true. Joan Didion t makes the farm lands in the Sacramento Valley arid and inhospitable. She writes about the people that way too. While the meaning of Run River is legitimate, the story is average and the writing unpolished. It does set the tone for her later and better works though. If those other novels had never been written, this one would have faded into obscurity. It’s not a great book, but if you’re inclined to see where the author of Play It As It Lays started off, it is worth reading once.

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

by Judith Rossner

      In the 1960s something happened in America that was called the Sexual Revolution. Alongside that, and sometimes overlapping with it, something else called Women’s Liberation gained momentum too. It was a time of social upheaval and times of such rapid social change bring risks because society runs wild into the wilderness without a map, without any plans, and without any guidelines to help ensure a safe transition into a new cultural mode of living. Some young people might struggle under a double burden as they try to find their place in a rapidly changing culture while also trying to find their place in the world, setting the stage for the role they will play for the rest of their lives. In Judith Rossner’s novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Theresa is a young woman, caught in the turbulence of this transitional time in American society.

The novel starts off with Gary Cooper White confessing to the murder of Theresa in a New York City police station. Cooper is a drifter from Florida, struggling with his own sexuality as he is in a relationship with another man, although he picks Theresa up in a bar for some fast and easy sex. The climax of the story opens the novel. What does this tell the reader? The murder is not the main point of the story. By putting it at the beginning we are quickly informed that the build up to this climax is what is most important.

So then we need to learn who Theresa is. As a child, she is alienated from her family. She has polio which leads to scoliosis and eventually a long stay in the hospital as surgery is needed to straighten her spine. She grows up feeling like an outsider with a permanent scar on her back and a slight limp which some men think makes her look sexy. In late adolescence, Theresa begins to connect with her older sister Katherine and begins to follow in her footsteps which is not necessarily in Theresa’s best interest. Katherine is promiscuous, uses drugs, gets into wife swapping, and has at least two abortions after getting pregnant without knowing who the father is. These passages in between the murder and Theresa’s first heart to heart talk with Katherine are the weakest parts of the book. Rossner writes like she can’t wait to get on into the juicier parts of the story and the result is some vague and muddled writing that suffers from lack of detail.

But things pick up when Theresa heads off to college. The naive young student gets targeted by a sleazy professor named Martin Engle who hires her to do his work for him, namely grading papers so he doesn’t have to. She walks directly into his trap, yet she does so willingly. The bed in his office is one among many clues of what is to come and mixed in with those clues are a lot of hints of how it will end up. Theresa wants to be seduced by Engle, but she doesn’t want to get dumped by him when she graduates and he moves on to another freshman who takes her place in his bed. All the subtleties of this affair are handled well since so much is obvious without the author explicitly saying so. You know that Engle is a skilled and experienced seducer of young college students. You know how the affair will end before it even starts. You know how it will effect Theresa even though she is smart enough to know what she has gotten herself into. But what works most effectively is how the process of seduction works. Engle searches out and finds Theresa’s primary vulnerability. He convinces her to explain why she limps and takes so much aspirin so she responds by showing him the scar on her back while telling him about her scoliosis. He offers her sympathy and emotional support in a way that come off as completely sincere. You can guess the rest.

After graduation, Theresa finds work as a grade school teacher, showing her compassionate and responsible side. At night, she prowls the singles bars of New York, picking up strangers for one night stands. This double life she leads functions as both a literary structure and as a psychological conflict for her as the book progresses. She eventually gets caught between two men. One is a grossly stereotypical working class Italian named Tony (as if there are no other possible names for Italian men in New York). He is crude, rough, insensitive, and a little bit dumb. Of course, he is amazing in bed so Theresa can not resist him even though she finds his personality to be revolting. The other man she sleeps with is James, an Irish Catholic lawyer who once considered joining the priesthood. James is intelligent and sensitive, but also a bit conservative. He isn’t too conservative though as he sees merit in some of the social changes happening around him. He even has extra-marital sex with Theresa although she finds it dull. She respects him for his mind and enjoys his company, but when he proposes marriage to her, she can not accept. Tony is the body, James is the mind. This dichotomy is cliché enough to make you role your eyes, but at least that unimaginative formula is filled in well with quality content. Both Tony and James are nuanced characters and through them we learn about all the fears and insecurities that Theresa has as she frets about what to do about the two of them. These psychological depths of Theresa are handled well with delicacy and sympathy by the author who brings us into the most intimate parts of Theresa’s mind, showing us how and why she is so unhappy and confused. When Theresa is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, she starts looking for ways to improve her life. And then...we already know where it goes. The process of developing Theresa as a character and portraying her self-consciousness and inner conflicts is the most subtly written part of the novel and also the strongest part of Rossner’s prose. With a non-judgmental approach, Rossner draws her as both fragile and strong simultaneously in a way that makes up for some of the more pedestrian aspects of the story.

Some people might be tempted to say this is a morality tale or a work of propaganda showing us what happens to women who engage in non-traditional lifestyles. This reading couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is more of a zeitgeist novel, examining the immediate effects of the social upheavals of the 1960s. For one thing, it shows how traditional family life is not necessarily compatible with the changing times of America. Theresa’s family does not give her the sense of self-esteem she needs to navigate the adult world and so she indulges in the risky behavior of using men for random sexual thrills. Her traditional family does not prepare her for the responsibilities that are necessary for relationships. James, her suitor, is also aware of the shortcomings of the old ways of living. Rossner indicates why the social movements of her time are appealing. By doing so, she raises questions about women’s roles in the family, women’s choices about when or if to get married, and whether women should be allowed to choose when, or even if, to have children. At the center of all this is the question of women’s sexuality and what it means on an individual level. Women need to be allowed to enjoy sexuality as they see fit, but they also need to consider the consequences and responsibilities that go along with it. Also of importance is the support women can give to each other. Theresa’s friend, another teacher at her school, invites her to a women’s discussion group where she learns that other women are struggling with the same problems she is. From them she learns that other women struggle with the issue of accepting their bodies, a central theme in this novel because of the scar on Theresa’s back and the way men notice her limp. This struggle to feel comfortable with her body is one of the roots of her feelings of anomie. Rossner is not writing to morally condemn Theresa; she is writing to provide a snapshot of her time in order to say that there are good and bad aspects of the social changes taking place. She is saying “Let’s stop for a minute, evaluate the situation, and decide what the best road to follow is from here on.” She isn’t necessarily saying that free love or extra-marital sex is wrong, but she is saying that we need to proceed with caution because this is new territory that contains significant risks.

The meaning of Looking for Mr. Goodbar is unique. It forges a middle path between hipster chic and stodgy, narrow-minded conservatism. Its evaluation of the Sexual Revolution and Women’s Liberation leaves the question of where to go from here unanswered, but also indicates the possibilities of good or bad paths to be followed. It was obviously intended for a commercial audience although it is more articulate and far better than 99 percent of the junk found on the best seller lists of the past 100 years. As American society continues to pass through sweeping social changes, you might be tempted to think the issues raised in this novel are outdated and specific only to that time, but the theme of an individual finding their place in a changing world, running into the wilderness without a map, is one that is timeless. The details may be outdated, but the dilemma is as old as the human race. It may make you wonder if the confusion we are suffering through as a society isn’t so unique after all.

 

Book Review

The Demon

by Hubert Selby Jr.

It’s the American Dream, Hubert Selby Jr. style. The Demon tells the story of Harry White, a corporate executive and sex addict from Brooklyn who simultaneously rises to the top and plummets to the bottom. It’s a Selby novel so you know from the start it’s not going to be pretty.

On the surface, Harry White seems like a good enough guy. He loves his family, especially his grandmother, and has potential as a businessman. We learn a lot about him when he plays softball on a team of regulars from the bar where he hangs out. During one game, a married woman pushes her infant past the diamond in a stroller. While playing in the outfield, he strikes up a conversation with her and abandons the game to go have sex with her while her husband is away. That happens after he scores the only run in the game. His team wins 1 – 0. This scene sets up the tone for the rest of the novel in two ways: one is that it that it shows how smooth he is at seducing women, and the other is that it sets him apart from his peers, proving that he is one step ahead of them. It also shows how quickly he can move from being a responsible team player to a man who can impulsively leave his responsibilities behind to pursue his own selfish interests. The psychology of his inner mental world comes out as the novel moves along.

The more Harry chases tail, the sloppier he gets at his job. His office manager Wentworth reprimands him for always coming back from lunch late, pushes him to be more professional, and start a family. Wentworth turns out to be a strong mentor for Harry, helping him tame his impulses, and sublimate them into superior work for the benefit of the corporation. One day, during an office party at a country club, Harry meets Linda, the woman he falls in love with, marries, and has children with. She is a bit more than a trophy wife as she nurtures his better side and brings out his finer tendencies. Aside from his deep commitment to her, he discovers he has a talent for growing plants, virtually turning their house into a wild jungle of trees, flowers, and hanging plants.

Up until this point, we know that Harry has a darker side. This is as much a story of his inner torment as it is a story of his rise to success. Selby describes this as a nervous and irritating itch in his inner mind that Harry tries to silence. At first, he can only silence it by seducing married women, but since this habit drives him towards irresponsibility, he decides to clean up his life and distract himself from his psychological pain by working extra hard. He temporarily cures his sex addiction by becoming a workaholic. This appears to be good since he grows wealthier, becomes a top executive helping to drive his company to greater business deals, and his marriage grows stronger. The problem is that all of his success does not cure his neurosis. Hard work and family life are only a medium-range fix and the urge to sleep around again grows stronger and stronger until he goes back to picking up women in bars. This up-again-down-again cycle of bipolarity continues through to the end of the book with the highs and lows getting more extreme. Harry’s entire motivation is to silence the nagging uneasiness that underlies everything he does. Eventually we see that this is his real problem; the sex addiction and climb up the corporate ladder don’t make it go away. After a brilliant passage in the book where Harry goes into therapy with a psychoanalyst that fails to see what the real problem is, he transfers his neurosis into other darker activities, namely shoplifting, burglary, and finally murder.

The contrasts embodied in Harry White are what make this book so successful. Harry is in the middle, between a happy marriage and a destructive impulse towards adultery. Harry is not sociopathic feeling guilty because he loves his wife and children. He knows what he does is wrong, but he is unable to control his behavior. He leads a double life because his secrecy stems out of a deep sense of shame. This is even more poignant because his wife is intensely devoted to him and worries about his mental health constantly. We see that Harry could have a more satisfying life if only he learned how to tame his inner demons. We also see that his mental discomfort motivates him to do both good and bad in equal proportions, making a cure for his neurosis an impossibility. Harry White is a tragic figure, not an evil figure.

The story is not terribly original. Harry White is the man who is unhappy even though he has everything. That obviously isn’t the strongest part of the novel. What is great about it all is that Selby, does what he does best: charting an inner landscape of one man’s misery and expressing it in a way that makes the writing almost more like poetry than ordinary fiction.

While Selby describes the psychological turmoil of Harry, one element is persistently absent. Selby never clearly spells out what the source of Harry’s neurosis is. At a certain level this works because it draws us closer to Harry’s mind, dragging us deeper into his mental confusion. And actually Harry knows that he is motivated by a desire to silence his mental pain, but he never gets to the deeper root of his problem. I do think Selby provides us with an ambiguous clue though. Near the end, before Harry’s final act of violence, he fantasizes about being a great softball player. This relays the narrative back to the beginning when Harry, being the most effective player on the team, abandons the game for a tryst. One way to interpret this is that Harry’s anxiety and proneness to addiction result from an unfulfilled desire to be a great baseball player. That’s every American kid’s dream, right? And yet the only thing that ever prevented him from reaching that goal was a misplacement of his priorities; he pursued a fleeting, short-term pleasure rather than working hard to gradually reach a long-term goal. Is Selby diagnosing an American illness, one that grows out of a quick-fix society where convenience and instant gratification override any desire for quality or deep satisfaction? Or maybe the softball fantasy is simply another manifestation of Harry’s neurosis, a Freudian cigar that is really just a cigar. The lack of a final answer just makes this novel more effective as an engine of discomfort.

In the end, Harry White is an archetype of the American Dream, though it is not ultimately clear if Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Demon is meant to make a statement about capitalism in America the way Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho does. Selby tends to write more about existential crises more than moral dilemmas, but he does so in a way that prods the reader towards uncomfortable moral questions. Harry White is just as disgusting as he is sympathetic and how you choose to judge him in the end says a lot about where you stand as a moral person in a morally flawed society, a sick society like America that could be healthy if only it learned to contain and control its evil, a society embodied in the character of Harry White, bent on destruction despite its unlimited potential for greatness.

 

Book Review

The Room

by Hubert Selby Jr.

In pre-modern times before prisons became institutionalized, criminals were punished by shunning or exile; they were either ignored by other members of society or they were sent out of their villages to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Since prisons were invented, criminals have been contained and segregated from the general population and sometimes even segregated from the prison population when put into solitary confinement. Humans are mammals, specifically primates, and so social bonds and community are necessary for survival. Isolated primates become mentally sick. A notorious scientific experiment was once conducted on rhesus monkeys where one monkey was separated from his peer group by a glass wall. He could see them but could not associate with them. He became depressed and angry and when the lab technicians released him back into the rhesus monkey population, he became hostile, aggressive, and violent towards the other monkeys. Solitude had made him insane and so he had to be permanently removed. The main character of Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room is a lot like that rhesus monkey.

That main character, who I will call the Prisoner because he is unnamed in the narrative, remains isolated in his jail cell, waiting for his trial, throughout most of the novel. Unable to leave, save for meal times, his only escape is inwards into his own mind where he indulges in either memories of his childhood or fantasies involving either his pursuit of justice or indulgences in the torture of the policemen who arrested him.

The first thing to notice in The Room is Selby’s writing style, a continuation of how he wrote his previous novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The punctuation is minimal and follows Selby’s own invented rules. This makes his prose rush along at a rapid pace. It also demands a lot from the reader in a way that benefits his style; it is difficult to be a passive recipient of information when reading Selby since the writing demands you pay careful attention to what is happening, when people are speaking since there are no quotation marks. The narrative also shifts between first and third person which is something else to watch out for. This benefits the narrative because it shows you who the Prisoner is from an inner and outer perspective. The shifts from third to first person also draws you into his inner world in a way that might not be possible using a different writing technique.

Needless to say, the Prisoner’s childhood memories are not pleasant. Two persistent themes are his relations with the police and a snowballing sense of shame. From a young age, he plays solitary games where he pretends to be having shootouts with the police. Otherwise, his real life interactions with them are not so bad. In one scene, a policeman helps him when he gets bit by a dog. Another policeman helps him when he gets injured. But then there is a suspicious incident where the Prisoner is in a park and a cop hiding behind a bush jumps out and smashes his hand with a billy club then runs away. It’s an improbable story and one that marks the Prisoner out as an unreliable narrator. This is the story he tells his mother when he returns home with an injury. It sounds like the kind of a story a twelve year old would make up if he were doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and was too ashamed to say what really happened.

The theme of shame and dishonesty persist throughout the Prisoner’s childhood memories. Most of these revolve around sex as his thoughts keep coming back to stains on his pants from either urine or semen. Some of the incidents that lead to these stainings are narrated more than once with differences in details each time therefore reinforcing the status of the unreliable narrator. For example, one story he tells his mother is that the urine stain on his pants was the result of an incident with a girl. He says he urinated on her and she got him back by urinating on him; somehow she had good enough aim so that her urine stream landed precisely right on his crotch. Again it sounds like a story a child would make up out of shame for what really happened like losing control and pissing in his pants.

Another stain he gets on his pants is the result of the Prisoner and a girl fondling each other in a movie theater. He has to walk home and performs an excessive cleansing of himself in the bathroom so no one can see the stain left by the semen. And so the theme of shame and the attending cover ups through actions and lies persist. You might also notice the way the Prisoner lies to himself in his jail cell inner monologues to justify his mistakes as if his self-deceptions are the only thread of hope he has to cling on to. His thoughts are just as much of a prison as his cell is.

As he lies in bed, the Prisoner’s mind becomes a stage for the acting out of his fantasies. One involves himself writing an imaginary letter to the press which sparks a government investigation into injustice and police brutality. You might notice that the letter is neither detailed nor persuasive, but in his fantasies it is. This launches into a grandiose story of the Prisoner being lauded as a hero for standing up for justice and speaking out to the media and in the courts. He also daydreams about representing himself as a defendant in court. His cross-examinations of the cops who arrested him are deranged, unrealistic, and absurd. They serve the purpose of confusing the witnesses more than cross-examining them though that really doesn’t matter because the Prisoner’s objective is to humiliate them more than anything. These grandiosities are silly and pathetic, but they reveal a lot about the Prisoner. He is a man with a mediocre mind fantasizing about being a genius, but since he lacks intelligence, his idea of “genius” just looks stupid. It also tells you something else about who he is. People fantasize about what they don’t have. So what kind of man would have grandiose fantasies about being a hero and an intellectual giant? A nobody, that’s who. Also notice that the Prisoner never writes, let alone sends, the aforementioned letter. He only dreams about it because he is a coward and could never bring himself to do such a thing. Indulging in self-pity suits his self-destructive purposes more than being assertive ever would.

Then there are the torture and rape fantasies. In two scenes, the Prisoner imagines himself kidnapping the two policemen who arrested him, taking them to a dungeon, which he calls the kennel, and training them to be dogs in ways that are sadistic and homo-erotic. They read like gay BDSM sessions that have gone horribly wrong. In another scene, he fantasizes about the two cops kidnapping and raping a woman in the woods. If this passage isn’t disturbing enough, then you have to understand that there is a whole other dimension to it. This fantasy is about not just the rape but how the two cops get away with with their it so the Prisoner can use it against them as evidence during the cross-examination during the imaginary trial. Tom Waits once sang “you’re innocent when you dream.” The Prisoner really puts this idea to its ultimate test.

These fantasies make the Prisoner look absolutely repulsive. And yet they are only fantasies and they come from the mind of a chronically lonely man, suffering from inadequacy and shame to the point of despair. He wallows in an inescapable pit of depression and his sadism is an attempt to make himself feel superior to someone else. At some level, these fantasies are also a means of torturing himself. In one part, he imagines cutting off the cops’ eyelids and shining bright lights at them while using eye drops to moisten their eyes. He controls when they are allowed to get the drops in a combination of the psychology of water torture and physical sadism. This transitions into the Prisoner lying on his bed and holding his eyes open for as long as he can while staring at the lights and then closing them to form tears. Those tears are just as emotional as they are for physical relief. He also uses similar language to describe the way the police restrained the woman during her rape and how they restrained him during his arrest while pushing him into the back of the police car. By associating himself with his imaginary victims, we get a sense that his own thoughts are a means of hurting himself.

When the Prisoner emerges from his memories and daydreams, he is alone with his thoughts in his cell and nothing else. He gets obsessed with a pimple on his cheek. Every time he prods at it, the painful thoughts of the police start up again. To him, the pimple is disproportionately painful to what it actually is. To most people, such a blemish would be a minor discomfort but for him it is an excruciating reminder, like the semen and urine stains on his pants, of how worthless he feels. While suffering in his shame and isolation, such a trivial thing becomes magnified to a point of incomprehensible pain.Then while in his bed, his pants get stained again and he has to go to the mess hall trying to hide it from the other prisoners. He begins feeling nauseous and finally admits that nausea has been the only friend he has ever had. You can’t get anymore sick with loneliness than that. There is no way out of his cell, there is no way out of his isolation, and there is no way out of his mind. All three are his inescapable prison.

The subject of this book is a loser. He is a whiner, a complainer, a coward, a weakling, and a failure. His isolation is a double-bind since it causes him to be miserable while his misery drives other people away. Can you blame those other people for ignoring him? You have to admit that you probably wouldn’t want to be around him yourself. He’s just one of those problematic people you’d be better off avoiding. It is a discomforting thought that we might be complicit in this man’s loneliness and despair. On the other hand, by reading this book we get up close and personal with him. At some level, we relate to him. Is anyone happy all the time? Hasn’t everyone felt alone in the world at some point? We may not be as miserable as he is, but we have all been miserable at least once and the Prisoner reminds us of that. It is another discomforting thought that we might have something in common with such an unappealing person.

As unique and provocative as this novel is, there is one major flaw in the prose. There are at least three passages where Selby just goes on for too long. The most memorable one is the scene where the main character and a girl fondle each other in the movie theater. It goes on for a good fifteen pages and, honestly, that isn’t necessary. Once you know what they are doing, it doesn’t need to be excessively explained over and over again. We all know what a hand job feels like and don’t need it to be explained. There are a couple other passages where Selby just plain overshoots his mark. It is also a little too obvious at times that this novel was inspired by Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of the Flowers which, I have to say, is actually a much better work of art.

I can’t say The Room is for everybody. Then again, Hubert Selby Jr. generally isn’t for everybody either. It takes a certain amount of courage and dedication to finish a novel like this. The kind of courage it takes is motivated by the desire to understand someone who is not like we are, someone we would rather not know about, the kind of person most people would ignore. Then it also takes a certain kind of honesty to admit that we might have some common ground with such a person. It gives you a different perspective on life, but maybe one that is tragically important for understanding the human condition.

 

Book Review

Last Exit to Brooklyn

by Hubert Selby Jr.

     This neighborhood in Brooklyn is a vision of Hell that could torment Dante Alighieri. It’s just as poetic too. Hubert Selby Jr.’s notorious Last Exit to Brooklyn takes its readers to rock bottom levels of social depravity. This isn’t a book that utilizes shock value solely for the sake of controversy though. It is animated by an unspoken compassion and righteous anger that would ruin the book’s impact if it were stated explicitly.

Last Exit to Brooklyn isn’t a novel in the conventional sense. It is actually written like the past-together pulp science-fiction novels of the 1950s and done so for the same purpose. It is a series of short stories with overlapping characters and themes, some of which appeared in literary publications before being strung along as a continuous narrative here in novel form. This might cause some confusion to the reader who doesn’t know this beforehand. Once you realize it is constructed like a symphony or a work of modal jazz, it is easier to understand. Maybe that is one good reason to read it twice.

The first thing you might notice from the start is Selby’s unconventional style of writing. He uses Jack Kerouac’s style of spontaneous prose as a springboard and launches into paragraphs with minimal punctuation that follows the author’s own rules. Selby wrote this way so his typing fingers could keep up with his rushing mind since the language traveled at speeds too fast for his body to keep up with. The result is a fast-paced flood of language that resembles the delirium of Arthur Rimbaud’s Symbolist poetry only it is without so much symbolism and maintains a vivid clarity all the way the way through. It makes you feel like you’ve just stolen a car and as you accelerate and drive away at high-octane, speed you suddenly realize that the brakes don’t work and it’s too late to do anything about it. You can risk jumping out, you can keep driving until the gas tank is empty, or you can continue on until you crash and burn, living in the fleeting thrill of the wildest ride in your life.

The first chapter opens by introducing a blue-collar neighborhood in Brooklyn. There are no main characters in the novel; you could actually say the neighborhood itself is the main character. Populated by a gang of hoodlums, drag queens, cops, soldiers, working class men, and anybody else unlucky enough to wander into this rough side of town, it also houses a Greek diner, a dive bar, a labor union headquarters, a factory, and a military base. Nearby is a housing project which enters the narrative in the last chapter.

This first chapter introduces a young thug named Vinnie and his friends. They get their kicks by committing petty crimes, mostly shoplifting and mugging soldiers from the military base who are out on leave. When these kids aren’t beating someone up, they take turns beating each other up. That’s just the kind of world they live in and they live in it with confidence and comfort. The character of Vinnie returns after the next section which simply describes a working-class family party celebrating a shotgun wedding and the birth of a child with the subplot of a guy whose only ambition in life is to buy a motorcycle. In the third chapter, Vinnie is the object of Georgette’s desire. Georgette is a drag queen who turns tricks uptown for money so she can buy drugs and liquor and live the life she wants. In a brutal twist of symbolism, Cupid’s arrow hitting a smitten lover’s heart becomes a weapon of senseless cruelty, Vinnie and his friend torment Georgette by throwing a knife at her over and over again in front the the Greek diner. The fun ends when the knife gets stuck in her leg. Georgette goes home where her brother assaults her for being gay rather than helping her with her wound. Georgette gets through her trauma by desiring sex with Vinnie. A couple days later, she goes to a party with several other drag queens and prostitutes and Vinnie shows up with his friends. They stay up all night eating benzedrine tabs like popcorn and getting drunk. When dawn approaches, it turns into an orgy. Georgette gets what she wants from Vinnie, but is disappointed since it doesn’t turn out the way she wants it to. The end is a spiral into self-destruction that is a precursor for the way the following stories end.

This whole section is beautifully written, almost more like a work of poetry. It is a lot like a literary rendering of The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray”, though maybe a bit darker. And on a Velvet Underground record, you get seedy lyrics along with rough, sometimes poorly executed music recorded on lo-fi technology, yet the passion of the music is what matters and it stimulates strong emotions. That is how Hubert Selby Jr. writes and it reflects the kinds of people he writes about. It’s no wonder that Selby had such a big influence on punk rock.

Next up is the story of “Tralala”. The titular character is a prostitute whose johns tend to be soldiers from the nearby military base. When an officer on leave takes her to an upscale bar on Times Square, she goes on a rampage selling sex for money and rolling passed out drunks, but mostly just selling her body. After getting kicked out of that bar, she starts heading downtown, frequenting lower class places rapidly descending downmarket towards sleazier and dirtier drinking holes until she ends up back in Brooklyn. Tralalala does little thinking and any thoughts that enter her head are subservient to her intuition. Her intuition doesn’t do her much good as her purpose in life ends up being nothing but screwing losers for money without even knowing why she does so. Tralalal crashes hard in the end when she consents to pull a train in a parking lot next to a junked, abandoned car. It doesn’t stop there. She pulls every train that passes through Brooklyn and then some until she is abandoned as nothing but a piece of rancid meat in a pile of garbage.

Does this make you uncomfortable? It should and not for the obvious reason. Tralala does everything she can to get herself into such a wretched fix so it is difficult to sympathize with her. This is what is clever about the story: it pushes you to the limits of your empathy and makes you confront the possibility that you may not be as kind-hearted as you think you are. It’s like having an angel on your shoulder saying “Don’t worry about her. She’s a trashy girl who got herself into that mess” while Hubert Selby Jr. wearing a devil’s costume, sits on your other shoulder saying with a lower-class Brooklyn accent, , “Of course you should pity her, you asshole. She’s a human being just like you are.” (Now it’s time to take a break and re-read William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.”)

By this point you might see a pattern emerge. Selby writes about people who are trapped in a nightmare world they didn’t create. With limited psychological, social, or economic resources, they don’t have the means to escape so they take whatever path they think is open to them. Just because they make the mistake of choosing the wrong paths doesn’t mean they aren’t striving to be something better. Saint Selby mercilessly challenges you to sympathize with the least desirable people in American society.

So Georgette seeks liberation in romance with a thug who doesn’t respect her and Tralala pursues transcendence by immolating herself in the self-destructive life of prostitution. Now Harry enters the novel in “Strike”, the longest and most developed passage in the book.

Harry is an odd character. From the opening paragraph, we learn that he is more sexually attacted to his infant son than he is to his wife. Nonetheless, every night he has sex with her and then sleeps fitfully while being tormented by nightmares that symbolize his feelings of entrapment. In the daytime, he works as a lathe operator in a metal working factory. He is also the union’s shop steward. As an apathetic worker, he does the bare minimum of labor and spends the rest of his time either doing nothing or stirring up trouble over union rules. The union leaders know he is a fool, but they keep him on as shop steward because he is such a thorn in the side to the factory managers.

When the union contract comes to an end, a strike is called. Harry is put in charge of “managing” the strike although his duties are little more than sitting in the headquarters, stamping the striker’s union books, and getting drunk while listening to the radio. The union leaders give him carte blanche with an expense account and most of the money he spends is on beer and junk food for the strikers. Really, he is being set up as a fall guy in case the union gets into any trouble, legal or otherwise.

The strike grinds on for a long time. While the strikers morale sinks lower and lower, Harry’s sense of self-importance grows. Being the nominal boss of the strike makes him feel like a big shot even though he contributes nothing of any value to the cause. Then he befriends Vinnie and his gang of hoods. They take advantage of him, drinking up all the beer Harry pays for with the expense account, but Harry naively thinks they are his friends. They mark a turning point in the story when the union president hires them on the sly to blow up the trucks of a shipping company that broke the picket line at the factory. More importantly, they introduce Harry to a drag queen who he later pursues in a gay bar. Harry comes out and begins leading a double life that involves gay relationships. You can almost feel happy for him since his nightmares end and begins feeling good for the first time in his life. But this is undercut because at the same time he begins beating his wife who has no knowledge of his alter-ego. Harry thinks he has found his true self and then the strike ends; he goes back to being a mediocre lathe operator while all the elation he felt while being the boss of the strike wears off like a magic spell that has run its course. For Harry, it all ends in tears. Those tears are bloody tears too.

What makes this story so great is hard to explain, not because an explanation is beyond description, but because the story really speaks for itself. Harry runs the course from being an unsympathetic character to someone you can begin to cheer for and then falls back into being a sad and lonely loser in the end. At the peak of the story, you hope that his liberation will help him work out all the anger that makes him violent and irresponsible if he is just given enough time. Harry gains your sympathy and understanding, then while some of that lingers his life descends back into a nightmare existence. He isn’t a great person but that is the whole point. Hubert Selby Jr. isn’t concerned with portraying heroes. He is concerned with portraying the kinds of troubled people we don’t like and asking us to re-evaluate them in terms of the rotten situations they live in.

Finally, the last chapter is not so much of a story as a weaving of narrative threads and vignettes all taking place across the span of a day in a low-income housing project. As all its inhabitants cross paths, we get a picture of a concrete hive in Brooklyn like the inner circle of Dante’s Hell. It’s filled with fighting couples, domestic violence, adulterers, neglected children, alcoholics, delinquent teenagers, snobs, bums, alcoholics, and all around inconsiderate people. To top it all off there is an elderly Jewish woman, living a life of quiet despair in her loneliness, running on the fumes memories she has of her dead husband and a son who got killed in the war. She anchors the narrative by showing us how alone in the world all of us really are and how painful that loneliness is. Under the worst circumstances, we could all end up being just like her. Reading this passage is like listening to some melancholy musical suite in its execution. It brings you into a world that you would rather not be in. Doesn’t that just re-enforce the point that none of these characters want to be where they are anyways? You, the reader, can always close the book and refuse to finish reading. Like the guilty being punished in Dante’s Inferno, these characters don’t have the luxury of escaping. For you, this is the last exit TO Brooklyn; for them there is no exit FROM Brooklyn or at least, they don’t have what it takes to find an way out.. You may not like these people but the least you can do is have some understanding of what they are struggling with. After all, they might be better people if they were thrown into a kinder world.

Last Exit to Brooklyn is crude in its content, style, and execution and that is the point. There are times when it makes you feel like you’re being punched in the head while throwing up and having diarrhea at the same time. Hubert Selby Jr. has commented that he wrote this novel to portray a world without love. He actually said that he wrote about each character out of love. Selby wasn’t a mean-spirited or a sadistic man; in actuality, he was a gentle soul who felt a lot of anger over the human condition. A lot of this resulted from the absence of his irresponsible and alcoholic father and this can be seen in the consistent theme of terrible fathers in this novel. This novel is a picture of city life that he holds up in our faces as if to shout at us about how our society has taken a wrong turn. Along the way he dares us to find it in our hearts to have compassion for those we think of as irrelevant, unimportant, uninteresting, or worthy of our scorn. As repulsive as this novel is, it was written out of courage and we as readers need to be courageous enough to read it.