OF A GOLDEN AGE

today i spent probably five hours reading through page 500 of normal mailer’s the executioner’s song for my upcoming enormous project. my point in mentioning it really has little to do with the book itself but more with some of the patterns in it — mailer mentions truman capote and in cold blood; gary gilmore quotes percy bysshe shelley to his girlfriend. at the capote bit, i said, aloud, to myself, “oh man! intertextuality!” (thankfully i was the only person in the room.) the shelley was this stanza from the conclusion of “the sensitive plant”:

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream.

it was a whole day of remembering people and music that i’d left somewhere else, on a broken hard drive or in the part of my mind where i put friends who aren’t friends anymore. just now, someone sent me a copy of the neutral milk hotel album in the aeroplane over the sea, which is absolutely a tremendous thing that i have missed. how strange to miss something when you don’t realize you miss it — to go from no expectations to blissed-out gratitude like turning a light switch.

the other day, my friend steve was in my room while i moped around sick before top chef came on at nine. i have a giant playlist of upbeat songs that i put on shuffle most of the time, and mary chapin carpenter came on — probably “passionate kisses,” which is one of my favorites by her. steve laughed and said he hadn’t heard this song in ten years, that it reminded him of his parents.

in steve’s section of 258, we read heart of darkness last week. i’d never read it, which is apparently some kind of travesty among high-school english courses. people remarked in class that they’d read it two, three, four times for other teachers and professors.

i found myself glad i didn’t read it before, though. steve introduced a reading that was a drastic departure, both in depth and in overall attitude toward the text, than any reading i’d heard of in high school or otherwise.

and this made me think, again, about how glad i am for all the levels on which you can read most books. in order to talk about books with any genuine zeal or to find commonalities among different people’s taste in books, you have to dig much deeper than the superficial “it’s a story about a man taking a trip” kinds of descriptions.

in diane’s class this morning we made a list of the potential genre categories for everything is illuminated, which of course ranged from postmodern to epistolary to successful first novels. diane asked what kinds of books we might say are similar to this one, and the answers varied wildly, as did people’s sentence-long descriptions of “what the book is about.”

a concept that came up in discussions for both heart of darkness and everything is illuminated was light. we asked ourselves if anything WAS illuminated at the end of the latter, and someone sharply pointed out that illumination does not necessarily imply clarity, just light. it made me start to think of the book as headlights in a dense fog — in this case, the less light you can manage with, the better.

on the other hand, heart of darkness arguably moves in the reverse. what could be a reasonable gray area — that is, the relationship between british “conquerors” and the african people they subsume — is transformed by the europeans into an ultrapolarized black-and-white situation. in this case, illuminating the white means making the “darkness” even more strikingly black by comparison.

illumination does not imply clarity.

in my twentieth-century jewish-american literature class, we’ve started the semester with jonathan safran foer. (to conclude in april, we’ll be reading foer’s wife, nicole krauss.) his second book, extremely loud and incredibly close, left what can best described as a terrible taste in my mouth and i couldn’t even bring myself to finish it. this is rare! especially for a book that came highly praised!

needless to say, i was wary, very wary, of everything is illuminated. it’s similarly tricksy and postmodern, with layered narratives and a staccato, nonlinear structure. i read in about twenty-five pages and decided i hated it — it’s tedious and confusing, and i didn’t feel invested in the characters.

then something changed. i started to pull out my mechanical pencil to underline passages that made me laugh out loud, say “aww” to myself, want to cry a little. this happened more and more, and suddenly i could not put the book down. i LOVED it.

the last sixty pages were sort of stupid and anticlimactic. the postmodern gimmicks are distracting at first. but on the whole, this book is enormously pleasing. foer is a smart, stylish writer, walking a fine line between goofily-meta and well-balanced storytelling. he writes in a number of different voices in this novel, and each is fleshed out and expressed fully.