Book Review: Home

Home - Marilynne Robinson

The first hundred pages of Marilynne Robinson's Home are boring. Disappointing. Having thoroughly enjoyed her novel Housekeeping, I wondered how this novel could be so dry and shallow. Glory, a grown woman, having some unmentioned embarrassment, has returned to the home of her youth to look after her aging father. These first hundred pages are filled with descriptions of life in the house now and reflections of life in the house when she was young. And then one of her brothers returns home and the story becomes deep, rich, and finally compelling.

Jack was the outcast, the one of six or seven children who set himself apart. The anxiety of his appearance is palpable. The father feels he did wrong by his son, obviously failed him in some way that led him to be so distant and to get himself into the trouble that followed him into adulthood. Glory, some years younger, had held a magical sort of notion of her older brother, believing she always had some connection to him.

Jack has also suffered some embarrassment, or many of them, including jail or prison, alcoholism, homelessness, and some sort of current entanglement with a woman with whom he hopes to reconcile. He is awkward, embarrassed by who he is, socially inept in a way that Robinson makes real. Not only do you sense his sorts of fits and starts in trying to be a good son, a good brother, someone deserving of respect and maybe forgiveness, but Glory's embarrassment for him is also strongly felt. She wishes he could get over it all and just relax, she feels bad for him, but she is also embarrassed. Maybe for the respect she has always had for him.

It turns out that Jack is concerned about his soul. With his father and his father's best friend both clergy, the novel is heavy on theology. But never to the point of turning away the heathen. Jack is looking for help, knows his scripture, but can't bring himself to believe it.

The conversations in the novel surround grace, predestination, salvation, and perdition, but at the bottom of it all is the idea of identity. Each of the novel's main characters suffer from a lack of understanding of whom they have become. They have difficulty knowing how they got from who they were to who they are. And how far off who they are is from who they they would prefer to be.

And all of this is carried with enough tension, enough action to keep the reader moving along. Enough of everything to make up for the failings of the first hundred pages.

20 Essential Albums: Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul - The Beatles

I can only assume that The Beatles’ Rubber Soul must have been played a lot when I was a child.  Hearing it sometimes I can imagine playing on what seemed then like a wide expanse of carpet.  And still, the album became important to me across many eras of my adult life.

Rubber Soul is socked full of singles, songs we know well from a variety of settings. Together, though, they form an album that is at times earnest and joking at other times. No one should believe that they could sing “Beep beep, beep beep, yeah” without a tongue in their cheeks.  Often it is the backing vocals that reveal the sarcasm in the pop songs.  The songs are so well crafted and yet they seemed to sing of a life that was still to come, at least hearing the songs as a youth.  Hearing lines like “Carve your number on my wall / and maybe you will get a call from me / if I needed someone” conjured an adulthood of entanglements and emotions that could only be imagined.  Even as an adult, it is as if The Beatles have packaged a variety of elements from your life into a perfect pop song, with the backup vocals going “Aaaahhh, ah, la la, la lala.”

20 Essential Albums: Goat

Goat - The Jesus Lizard

One the elements most essential to good alternative music is the role of the bass guitar in the music. Certainly in the music of The Jesus Lizard, the bass plays the role of the rhythm guitar.  It is what propels the songs, with the guitar sliding over the surface.  Oh, and then there’s David Yow’s singing.  Sometimes the music is about more than the “quality” of the vocals.

Goat is another album that deserves to be played loud. Put on “Nub” when you need a little motivation, or “Monkey Trick” when you need to combine a driving rhythm with the occasional scream.  Another 1991 release, Goat was an antidote to Pearl Jam.  The music coming from a place more honest and raw.  Like a open wound of some sort.

I’ve probably seen The Jesus Lizard live more times than any other band, not only because the sound translates well live but because of David Yow’s onstage antics. Sometimes abandon is exactly what is called for. Live or just loud, The Jesus Lizard makes you feel like throwing yourself against the world like a stage dive.

20 Essential Albums: Bakesale

Bakesale - Sebadoh

         
Sebadoh’s album Bubble and Scrape came to me through a borrowed cassette tape from a close friend and, though there a great songs there amidst the noise, it was Bakesale that became the important album.  It helped that Sebadoh gave up some of the pure noise that infected their previous efforts, but Bakesale showed it was okay to write sensitive indie rock.  It was 1994; maybe it was emo before emo became a thing.

         
The guitars on the album are loose, maybe a little out of tune, barely distorted. The drums often shuffle with a backbeat that would come off as funk in another setting.  And Lou Barlow’s voice is thin and plaintive. When he sings “There's nothing wrong with the need to please,” you believe him.  And there’s a song like “S. Soup”, led by the band’s Jason Lowenstein. Loud and harsh, the bass up front, the song makes you agree with the lines “Crazy people are right on / crazy people are right.”

Book Review: Falconer

Falconer - John Cheever

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.

20 Essential Albums: OK Computer

OK Computer - Radiohead

I’d known Radiohead from the singles off their first two albums, the second album The Bends even became a favorite, but it was 1997’s OK Computer that revealed the band’s art.  On first listen, it was “Climbing up the Walls” that got my attention.  Thom Yorke’s falsetto, the atmospherics, and then feeling like we’re waiting for storm clouds to break open. But is probably the album’s second track “Paranoid Android” that is Radiohead to me. The song has everything. Starting with acoustic guitar and a clicking rhythm and a lead guitar that finds its way in through the back of the head. And when the storm clouds open here, the listener is beaten, pushed and pulled, and finally let go again. Indeed, the song’s bridge leaves us to float in some sort of psychedelic dream.

            The album sounded like a culmination of everything that came before, all the music I’d ever liked. Indeed, it came into my life in the same sort of era. When everything felt like it was coming together, like things were making sense. A time when you can appreciate the troubles you’ve been through, even relish them somewhat, in order to appreciate the life that has come out of all of it.

Book Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

Taking place over three days during the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls follows an American and a loose band of guerrillas as they prepare to play their part in a coming assault on the fascists. Three days is a short amount of time, especially for Hemingway. Compared to the rollicking, faster-paced novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, the pacing here leads the author to divergences, wanderings that slow the pace. Three days is long enough, though, for the American to fall in love, to hear stories of brutality rivaling a Cormac McCarthy novel, and still maintain a tension that keeps us reading on.

Self-reflection takes place throughout the novel and it isn't the author's strong-suit. Hemingway attempts something that is the antithesis of what what we consider to be Hemingway. When we look at a story like "Hills Like White Elephants," we don't need the reflection to see the tension, to understand what is at stake. In the novel we have pages upon pages of the protagonist in conversation with himself. This is not to denounce self-reflection. My own writing sometimes relies more on this than the abstract unsaid. In this novel, though, it is unsuccessful.

The novel also commits a bete-noire. Some two-hundred pages in, the perspective shifts. We've spent nearly half the novel already following the American and then suddenly we slip into the perspective of a secondary character. We come back, but it happens again, this time into the perspective of a minor character in a lengthy section that takes place away from the main action. I don't know if this was a way to fill in the novel or the result of the author's boredom with the regular perspective and action. It is a pet peeve for me. I hate it in movies, too. Like in a mystery, when suddenly we see a bit of action away from the major character that tells us something that would otherwise be unknown.

There are many things for which the book has merit, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it. Not when there are better Hemingway novels to read.