Bill Gaston's The Order of Good Cheer

By alternating two distinct stories in a back-and-forth sequence of four chapters each (plus a coda from the first one), Bill Gaston, in his 2008 novel The Order Of Good Cheer, is hoping to make specific connections. The main thematic of acceptance of circumstance, no matter how dire, with joy and courage, is a fascinating and important one. In l’Habitation, Gaston’s fictional account of 1606-07 Port-Royal, the carpenter Lucien provides the positive character study, spurning the humourless and danceaphobic authority of Champlain in order to roam and, eventually, couple passionately with an indigenous Mi’qmah woman. (There’s a further association one can make with Lucien’s profession and his eventual outsider status, especially considering Champlain's reluctance to convert heathens desirous of the Christian faith.) Andy Winslow, in the contemporary Prince Rupert story, is the passive obverse. At thirty-nine, and still pining for his high school sweetheart, the grain worker’s pensiveness and insecurity deepens when he learns that she’ll shortly be arriving in the port town.

Gaston’s tone is compassionate, his writing is crisp, even elegant, if a little over-reliant on eighteenth-century mannerisms (“he must needs” appears as a frequent all-purpose crutch) in the generative narrative, and his characterizations are colourful and distinctive. Champlain, here, is a complex character. Deeply afraid of a repeat of the “scurve” among his men, he comes around to the idea that those susceptible to the sickness are weakened by their own gloom. So, despite his own anguish, he proposes an “order of good cheer”, a feast and convivial appreciation, every evening in attempt to waylay the insidious disease. From our superior position in history, we can laugh at the luck involved in the vitamin C-laden needles mixed in with the chef’s beefy kitchen compositions. Perhaps Gaston is saying that fate favours the imaginative and proactive. Andy’s own story-closing party is similarly informed by a hopeful communal urge, as well as an unconfident one. And because Andy’s runaway will-she-won’t-she fretting over Laura’s incipient reception of him became overmuch by mid-book, it was good to see the relationship work out in a more complex series of questions and open-ended possibilities in that last full chapter.

The powerful idea behind The Order Of Good Cheer is at times telegraphed too obviously, the ties between one chapter and the next unsurprising. But Gaston also works that idea with wisdom and sharp realization, even with a subtle accusation and anger, as in, “[i]t is exceeding strange how many will search deeply in themselves for sign of sickness, and therefore find it, but not fall as truly ill”, from the beginning of the last full “Champlain” chapter.

Enjoying the book throughout, but wary of an unearned feel-good ending, I was relieved to see the various ideas work themselves out organically.

James Dickey’s Deliverance

James Dickey’s best work was accomplished with ragged right-side lines. He was a justly lauded poet, but the same markers – extreme experience, surreal and ambiguous transformation, lyrical power – appear in his novels. It’s understandable, then, that the bookending chapters, and the preamble to the second section, show Dickey’s worst side: he’s in choppy water with mundane detail and thought, often and justifiably absent in much poetry but necessary in most novels. “The routine I was used to pulled at me, but something in me rose daringly above it, full of fear and feeling weak and incompetent but excited,” This is awful writing, but low-boil connection also suffers. After the long tension-drenched narrative has subsided, the reader encounters dialogue that strains emotional credibility, as in this response from Ed Gentry to his confused  wife: “ ‘I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. Somebody may be after me. Also, the law may be after me. I’ve just got to tough it out. If nothing happens for a couple of weeks, I think we’ll be all right.’ “ Well, that’s sure comforting, especially since Ed’s wife has no idea what he’s not even hinting at. And she’s a tough woman, too!

Dickey’s prose shines, though, when it’s one man against chaotic elements, and the psychology of violence. He also shines with lyrical description, and many times those strengths piggyback one another, as in this quote during the long wait before the kill: “... the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.”

The first chapter also introduces the theme of stunted or inferior art: Ed is a competent arranger of artistic expression in his ad career (with experiences, no doubt, from Dickey’s own unhappy advertising job) but cannot come up with a generative idea; Drew is an entertaining guitarist, but without originality; Lewis is depicted as an exceptional athlete and outdoorsman, ideologically, practically, and intuitively. But even after saving the lives of two of his friends (three, briefly), the river “defeats” his superior body. Dickey, by relentless natural description, offers a convincing conclusion, weak in more theoretical novelists and poets, about the limits to personal will and artistic manoeuvring. The novel, unlike the movie, ends on a curiously upbeat note, and Lewis, with permanent limp by the placid lakefront (wonderful touch by Dickey) accepts his mortality with grace and humour.  

Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

Many Pynchonheads read their novelist-idol for the dizzying conspiracy adventures, others for the lyrical run-ons. Some love the crazy-ass dialogue, some the scientific speculation, some the scattershot narratives.  One or two, I’m sure, grow mystic or misty-eyed over alternative universes and imagined histories. I can dig all facets, but I’m most cool with the (frequently disparaged) puerile humour and insouciant tone.

That tone was crucially fractured beyond even a postmodernist’s effective complex structure in V., Pynchon’s first novel. Hijinks flipped with solemn death traps, and the shocking switches in tonal approaches didn’t highlight either polarity to good formal effect and control. Formal control? In Pynchon? Well, the novel here ain’t your realist Zola castigation, but it shur-as-shootin’ ain’t mix highlights from Thomas Hardy to Dave Barry, either.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s various storylines, still and always shaggy and out-of-bounds, inform each other even when main characters are absent for two-hundred-or-so pages. Actually, that’s a funny choice of words, “inform [on] each other”, since the darkness in Vineland – hippies as snitches in a new, opportunistic field, as offshoots of the FBI – brilliantly prefigures many elements in the West’s wire-tapping, computer-mapping, surveillance-sapping modern world, as well as looking behind to the Soviet Union of the twenties and East Germany of the sixties. That said, it’s a terrific victory for Pynchon in that he’s lighter, more convincingly so, in this 1990 look at 1984 (Reagan’s re-election, not Orwell’s vision, though those comparisons are unavoidable, as well). And the frequent humour scores on another level, as well, as all good humour should – the faint optimistic vibe throughout, even after the shit has hit the whirling fan, is maintained because many of those ineffectual layabouts have a personality, a skewed, unbureaucratic imagination that can’t be crushed by federal Brock Vond decrees.

And that’s my biggest arguement against some of the thumbs-down reviewers/readers of Vineland. Billy Barf and the Vomitones may have a sympathetic audience, and the Tube detox may be thriving (oh wait, it’s not an issue in 2014? maybe those layabouts at least knew about one  big problem) in Pynchon’s alternate history, but the novel pays tribute to an idealism grown from the 50s (not the 60s, as is so often misunderstood), an idealism understandably naive and vulnerable. We have no such excuse for a lack of knowledge now. Unfortunately and ironically, in the saturated info age, we’re almost as clueless as ever.

Anton Piatigorsky's The Iron Bridge

(My fave read of 2013, first published in subTerrain.)

If permanent character is developed in the first six years of life, as many psychologists profess, the teenage years are the sun, wind and rain for those seeds to break out. There’s a problem with the analogy, though. We don’t often talk of “evil seeds”. In fact, in our current relative universe, evil people are just misguided, misunderstood, or unappreciated. Though it shouldn’t need challenging, Anton Piatigorsky, in his remarkable short story six-pack, The Iron Bridge, necessarily destroys that feel-good idiocy while still paying respect to the historical conditions that allow evil to fester and flourish.

Piatigorsky’s approach, consistent in all six studies, is to create an imaginary slice-of-life plunge into worthlessness and sadism. In four of his stories – featuring Idi Amin, Rafael Trujillo, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler respectively – sadism prevails, shocking in its abnormal manipulative cleverness relative to the age of its future despots. With Pol Pot and Mao Tse-Tung, however, he  concentrates on the sexual naivety and passivity of the lead characters. Some may see this latter contrast as evidence against the mistaken belief in circumstance over evil, but the author wisely shelves those early “seeds” in favour of recent causes which are common to many.

Consider the ruminations of fourteen-year-old Sar – the future Pol Pot – in the brilliant “A Plaything For The King’s Superfluous Wives”. After his humiliating sexual “awakening”, Sar “regards the serene vista before him. How wide the river is. How slow and peaceful”. This leads him to reflect on “the swollen Mekong River” which “reverses the flow of the Tonle Sap away from the sea and back into the great lake”. But if the obliteration of the self takes on a more mundane playing out for the rest of us, for Sar it’s a savage void that will have to be closed, in successive attempts, by the iron bridges of power, money, fame and sex, in results we’re all familiar with.

“Iron” is incorporated into all six stories. Idi Amin’s “gigantic fists clenched into powerful iron balls”. Pol Pot “finds a wrought iron bench beneath an ornate lamppost and takes a seat”. Mao Tse-Tung watches a mosquito as it “taps and taps against the ceiling, pulling away each time as if the boards were made from heated iron”. Stalin, as teenager Soso, faces “the iron-latticed window”. The young Trujillo “grabs his hat and an iron key ring from off a hook”. And the most faithful metaphor comes from the Hitler story, where the future Fuhrer “begins to draw the bridge”, which will, in young Adi’s imagination, “[replace] the present iron monstrosity, which is completely impractical for modern Linz”.

Piatigorski’s unobtrusive merger of fiction and history, both cultural and personal, into the stream of his narratives points to a gathering black cloud on a horizon beyond each conclusion. Aside from the metaphysical and philosophical issues it brings up about the nature and formative influences of dictators, all stories, especially the Stalin and Trujillo entries, are gripping and structurally intelligent.

Post Links

I had to pitch a hundred dollars worth of mothballs through moth-eaten cobwebs just to break into blogger again.

I've ordered most of my archived posts at the sidebar. A few still to add, including everything in the 2008 and 2009 year-end mini-reviews. Since those include many authors in one post, I'll note the "year-end" tag in brackets. As to other posts (prominently) including two or more authors, I've repeated the post across more than one author link (with a few exceptions).

Obviously I missed putting up a"best of" year-ender, but I'll post my fave in a day or two.

Fulgurations and Fenestrations, Part Two and Final

An interview in the latest edition of subTerrain finds poet Brad Cran responding to a suggestion by Brian Kaufman that Layton was sexist, falling "short of the mark as [a] decent human being[]" with his own take on Layton's poem "Misunderstanding":

“Layton suggests a woman who he is hitting on lacks a dedication to literature because she doesn’t want to have sex with him. I’m really not outraged in the least by this poem.

In fact, I find it comic and funny in a horny old man kind of way. So I don’t find Layton’s sexism directly offensive but rather I find it anachronistic, flawed thinking and it does taint the way I view him as an intellectual. It demeans his work.”

For those unfamiliar with the poem, here is “Misunderstanding” in its entirety:

I placed

my hand

upon

her thigh.

By the way

she moved

away

I could see

her devotion

to literature

was not

perfect.

Cran misunderstands. But before I get back to his crass, facile, and supercilious remarks, I’d like to explore several ways to look at Layton’s poem.

Who is the woman in the poem? None of us know, including Cran, so it’s not fruitful to lock her in as an attempted pick-up, and then base everything else from that. There are several other options which are, to my mind, more intriguing, providing more intellectual depth and emotional range.

First, the woman could be Layton’s wife (and we have to take it on faith that the man in the poem is Layton. I’ll allow for that, though it, also, could be too big of an assumption.). Occam’s razor slices through fanciful suggestion. Even among philanderers, striking out often occurs with one’s spouse because of obvious mathematical data based on the propinquity of sexual seduction. If this is indeed the identity of the characters, it changes the nature of the “moved/away”. Is it a sole spurned advance? If so, the “devotion” takes on new meaning. And it’s here I’ll explore a parallel that Layton is on record as having a concern, even obsession, with. In various letters, Layton lamented the nature of creation between a childbearing woman and (in his case, and in the possible mirroring parallel in this poem) a poem-making man. A child is life itself, whereas a poem is a much more nebulous, even dubious, thing. And a poem will never be guaranteed to have an extended life; a child will assert itself, however long or memorably, into the spiritual fabric of the world. Layton’s view on this was one of sadness and sympathy for himself and other literary creators, as well as envy for the woman so blessed with her unmistakable gift. Seen in this light, “Misunderstanding” leads one to pity the first-person narrator, or Layton if you prefer, for his ineffectual attempt at physical and literary fertilization. But there’s a humorous irony. The poem was an early entry in Layton’s 1959 compilation A Red Carpet For The Sun, meaning it’s been kicking for over a half-century. Cran’s take on it is illustrative, then, in that he talks about it at all. Layton has created a notable child. (Bad poems are forgotten, not debated.) And of course, Layton had conflicting views vis-a-vis giving birth and creating poems. His wish was to have his works talked about for centuries, just as he was fond of railing on those inconsequential souls who’d be forgotten even by their “loved ones” soon after they’d died. A fascinating, contradictory parallel.

Another take on the poem, also if postulating that the woman is Layton’s wife or longer-term lover, has to do with “devotion”, or fidelity in the wider sense. Just as she spurned his advance, so too does inspiration sometimes (or often) flee the scene when one has an idea, whether it’s hot or scattered. The humour in the poem can be viewed many ways, but certainly a lot of it can be seen at the narrator’s expense.

And that leads to another way of viewing these twenty-three words. Perhaps the woman is Erato the muse. I’m curious about the choice of “thigh”. Odysseus was pierced in the thigh by a boar on Parnassus, home of all the muses, when on a hunting trip. Is his seduction attempt just a clumsy, ill-timed one? In other words, would she have offered her gifts, poem-muse or physical woman, if his advances had been more clever or subtle?

There are other interpretations to flesh out, too. I’m very interested in “By the way” in that it’s not just that she turned away, but how she turned away that matters. There are many ways to seduce, and just as many ways to reject. All are illustrative, but since this is a grandly suggestive poem, it’s enough that it’s placed on the table at all.

Brad Cran has made an arrogantly assumptive, simplistic assessment and explanation for a timeless poem. But let’s look at those assessments a little, anyway. I’m intrigued by the tone. Notice how he takes the self-protective way out by first saying that the poem was “funny and comic”. It’s supposed to soften the way the reader accepts seeing the dagger go in shortly thereafter, and it’s a typical Canadian way of criticizing anything, certainly so in the realm of lit crit. Cran then immediately begins turning the thumb down with his “in a horny old man kind of way”. Interesting, since Layton was no more than forty-six years old when composing the poem, and, as I have put forth, the sexual and literary conclusions are complex. Cran, after his non sequitur “sexism”, goes on to call Layton’s attitude in this poem “anachronistic” and “flawed”. As if there is one right way to view physical traffic between the sexes. What, Cran always does the right thing, thinks the right thoughts? Struggles, many of them selfish,  between men and women will always be with us. There is nothing anachronistic about that. It’s this, finally, that grates. Cran’s often driven by feminist issues. I admire him for many of those views. But in poetry, it comes off as unoriginal, and pressing for votes.

If Cran or any others parading their easy complaints of misogyny or sexism want to see Layton in that vein, try his "Three on a Park Bench" or "Teufelsdrockh Concerning Women". It makes "Misunderstanding" sound like a fond slap by contrast. The former two poems aren't very good, either, which, after all, is the more important concern. And there are scores, hundreds, of other poems of his that express his frank hatred of men. But pointing those out don't score any political kudos. 

Fulgurations and Fenestrations, Part One

Stephen Henighan and the definition of reading

I like Stephen Henighan. He's a pants kicker. In a country festooned with literary droopy drawers, steel toe inserts are occasionally necessary. But in his recent Geist article, he makes a dubious case for books being the only medium possible for a deep, resonant reading experience. He goes further, to say that reading via electronic devices is not reading at all because of the attendant distractions, hyperlinked or sidebarred or pictorial. OK. It's a gathering argument, and by now a common one, and one that seems to be gaining cachet by repetition if not persuasiveness. But I'm more and more annoyed by the broad brushes, and by the sentimental value attached to the almighty book.

I love books. Though not a fetishist, I love their feel, heft, smell, unique configurations and colours, give and strength, font shock and internal typesetting flourish and quirk. Did I say sentimental? That's my argument for books. Henighan's more experientially precise, calling on the power of the book to submerge us in a world of uninterrupted imagination, ferried along by the linear play within the pages. But that's the experiential ideal. In reality, most readers are not allowed the luxury of an uninterrupted book reading experience. We steal twenty noisy reading minutes on the bus ride to work; we're the driver of the same bus, Bob Smith, who in an interview with questioner Grant Buday circa 2000, stole a minute or two of DeLillo or Dostoyevsky, for years, between long red lights; and we're the person (me), reading about Bob Smith on the upper ferry deck, surrounded by crazed teenagers and zigzagging foot traffic. In contrast, when I read online, it's often late at night. Alone and surrounded by quiet or (presently) the actual sound of non-proverbial crickets, I can sail along uninterrupted over great stretches of the written word, whether poem or essay, political argument or news article, blog post or comment stream. "But what about the long form, the novel?" Well, I admit I don't have an eDevice yet, but if I can concentrate and even entertain creative responses to and from my late-night pixelated adventures, I don't see the problem should the novel form, eventually, be housed in the electronic hive for the majority of its output. The glorious past, I'm afraid, is of no sentimental force here. Long, uninterrupted, imaginative depth: the reading experience of the typical Dickensian page-turner? Many of Dickens' novels were first encountered in serialized form, and in newspapers alongside yesterday's equivalent of baby bum powder and floor polish hortatory pitch. And I doubt that most readers a century and two score ago had the same leisure time as us. Snatching a chapter chunk here and there, they managed to get through the entry before the next week's installment. Or am I painting a too-gloomy social supposition, the extreme of Henighan's? Well, the truth's probably somewhere in the middle, but I highly doubt that many of the non-John Jarndyce citizenry were jumping from one canon-provider to another at any time of day or night in timeless wonder.

The reality is that we read how and when we can. A new mother? Another working two or three jobs? Still another with his head stuffed with reference books who breaks the spell willingly to look up an obscure word, or to corroborate a historical setting? Just so, one who reads online, be it long-form or not, isn't at the mercy of hyperlinks, footnotes (what, David Foster Wallace didn't exist?), or advertisements (Henighan's article is, itself, bordering a windowed pitch for two different books). When one is pleasantly ensconced in a story, argument, or entertainment, the medium is not the message, as Henighan says, in support of McLuhan. The media guru set that oft-venerated quote in a specific context. Radio was hot because the act of listening was intensely concentrative and reactionary. Hence, the phone-in "hot line". TV was cool because it created what we now can corroborate scientifically as brain waves inducing passive responses. And so on. Reading is active whether by internet or book. Those who worry that the internet itself is changing the wiring of the brain strike me as alarmists. It's -- again, to use McLuhan's term -- a hot medium. The reader -- or peruser, as Henighan would have it -- is in control. TV viewers strike me as quite different from those of the internet variety. In fact, I'd guess that those who watch many hours of TV a week choose passive-type pursuits on the web, as well. (After all, there's something for just about everyone on the info/entertainment highway.) So it's people's predilections, not the medium itself that matters.

Finally, people will vote, with their wallets, for whatever transmission source they wish. I do agree with Henighan that even ten years ago there were noticeably more heads buried in books in public than there were in iphone and related gadgetry. But anecdotes don't catch the whole story. Maybe many of those same people are saving the long-form reading, whether it's a historical compendium or Russian family epic, for the quiet and monklike seclusion of the home. And my belief -- and I admit it's only a belief -- is that they'll be able to do so just as well using a book, the web, or the eReader.