The Go-Go's: Cool Jerks Who Left Skidmarks on My Heart

Beauty and the Beat was Gidget with a sexy edge.

The image of those five talented and attractive musicians cruising Santa Monica Boulevard in a red, 1960 Buick LeSabre convertible in the video for "Our Lips Are Sealed" was California dreaming incarnate.

Nobody knew then, outside the band, that they were in fact the "Cool Jerks" of their cool song's title. Their exuberant music, blending the infectious optimism of rock 'n roll's early days -- a la the Surfaris -- with pop's poignant melodies and punk's incendiary rawness, is not fading fast.  The Go-Go's were it until they split, which wasn't long.  Beauty and the Beat, their unforgettable debut album, left long skidmarks on my impressionable, pre-pubescent heart.  I can hear that record's grooves spinning still with cracks and pops.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul

~ William Blake, from "Auguries of Innocence"

A novella scarcely 100 pages on half-sized leaves, finished in little more than an hour, Train Dreams hauls boxcars of story that could fully load the most epic of tomes.  Train Dreams is an epic yet terse tome tracking the eccentric lifetime of Robert Grainier from rustic outpost to wilderness depot.  The cadence of Train Dreams over precipitous trestles and into tunnels keeps time to the timelessness of Grainier's memories and not the continuum of a clock, so that we know Grainier the railroad builder before we know him as an orphan; know the happy short-lived family man after the long-time hermit.  We see the caboose quite often before the engine.  Grainier's jobs seem to converge and become the singular preoccupations in his life, be it freight carrier or logger, salvager or log cabin architect, and memories (or were they dreams?) lingered in Grainier's consciousness.  Despite its brevity, Train Dreams is no bullion cube of a book.  It's chateaubriand.  It communicates more not because of but in spite of conveying less.  So maybe it is the microscopic mass of William Blake's "grain of sand" -- so what?  Watch Denis Johnson make of it a world.

Credit Denis Johnson's nonchalant style, his miniaturist's skills (he is also a poet, and it shows), who wrought each day of Grainier's life to make them count.  Made each day count the way the best poetry makes each phoneme count. Frugal, but not a poor man's prose.  Granted, Johnson chose but a baker's dozen or so of Grainier's days to illuminate, but he chose the most poignant of his days.  Milestone days or crossroad days when Grainier, a wanderer of the northwest, understandably let his losses determine course.  Hard cargo he carried, not easily turned.  Grief haunted him, but he remained busy in his solitude (not discounting his nightly howling ritual with packs of wolves) deep in the lonesome woods, and it helped him maintain some levity, some sanity, commiserating his existence with those wild though faithful hounds.  Being preoccupied by his memories indistinguishable from his dreams, Grainier pretended not to notice the omnipresent heartache of the past gnawing on him. Train Dreams, thankfully, avoids the tragic melodrama of a made-for-TV train wreck because it's as tranquil as it is painful, and it does not blow smoke off even an inch of sentimental rails.

There's one day in Train Dreams that's stuck with me the most.  The day in 1917 when Robert Grainier, after nearly helping hurl a thieving "Chinaman" off a railroad bridge fifty feet above the Moyea River in Idaho's panhandle, walked two miles out of his way on his commute home from hard labor, to buy a bottle of Hood's Sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, whom he'd not seen in weeks.  She was home in their idyllic meadow cabin nursing their four-month-old, Kate.  Idyllic, that is, until Grainier's baby girl "did not seem to recognize him."  As that ominous day lapsed seamlessly into years, and the random conflagrations of  fate seared a bewildering estrangement between daughter and father that was the fault of neither, enter the unexpected forepaws of a fable and hind feet of a myth, that, thanks to Denis Johnson's imaginative gifts, crept aboard Train Dreams and helped it levitate off the tracks.

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

I will try to be Joan Didion's witness regarding A Book of Common Prayer (1977).  It is a great, ambitious novel.  It is not common.  Even despite its title, none of its characters have a prayer.  A not uncommon trait afflicting the characters of Joan Didion's novels.  That's just Joan being Joan.  Cynical and ironic.  Master of irony.  Cynic's mistress.  Joan Didion.  Making me ruefully laugh calling her third novel A Book of Common Prayer.  Amen.

A trait uncommon, I should amend, in the three novels I've so far read of the five novels of Joan Didion.  The other novel's by Joan Didion I've read being A Book of Common Prayer's predecessor, Play It As It Lays (1970), and Prayer's follow-up, Democracy (1984).   Perhaps they are common traits in the two novels by Joan Didion I've not yet read; her debut, Run River (1963) and most recent, though published nearly two decades ago around the time Clinton began his second term, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).  Maybe the characters inhabiting those novels have prayers.  But I doubt it.  Knowing Joan Didion as I do from what I've read by her, I know she plays it dark.  Dims the lights on hopes.  Draws the blinds on dreams.  Embodies delusions.

Or wait.  I'm being unfair to Joan Didion.   Joan Didion's characters, I should clarify, by their choices, have ruined their hopes and dreams, remained true to their delusions, and not Joan Didion.  I need to make that distinction clear.  I do not want to make the same mistake as Charlotte Douglas, waning starlet and society girl who is A Book of Common's Prayer's star.  Or more precisely, A Book of Common's Prayer's black hole.  The black hole whom, according to the narrator of the novel, Grace Strasser Mendana, "did not make enough distinctions in her life".  Grace Strasser Mendana would know.  She is a scientist, but also "a student of delusion" investigating its very DNA.  A Book of Common Prayer is essentially Grace's case study of Charlotte Douglas' puzzling demise.  But it's also a study of guilt.  Grace's guilt, not Charlotte's.  But that is the subject perhaps of another novel by Joan Didion, maybe of Democracy, or maybe not.

We know Charlotte is already dead on page one.

We know that Grace will soon be dead a few pages later, after learning that Charlotte is dead and that the narrative is a remembrance.  A memorial paying homage to delusion, to Charlotte  "who dreamed her life."  Who believed even as machine guns got her in their sights, that everything in the country of Boca Grande would turn out all right.

We know, as I already said, though it bears repeating, that no one has a prayer in A Book of Common Prayer.  Pardon my redundancy, but Joan Didion says the same words and phrases twice, thrice, four times.  Sometimes, Joan Didion says the same words and phrases twice, thrice, four times in italics.  When Joan Didion says the same words and phrases twice, thrice, four times in italics, she is not merely doing so for emphasis.  But to characterize the longing or the loss anchored in a person's memory.  Or for social or political commentary.  Or to set a brooding mood.  To evoke gravitas in her prose.  For effect, powerful effect, her poignant motifs.  Much has been made of Joan Didion's much-emulated style.  Ask Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion's copycat in style.  Or don't.  He might not like being reminded that the style he's made famous was never his to begin with.  But Joan's.  Read Joan Didion yourself and see.  Be Joan's witness.

We know that even those who do not die in A Book of Common Prayer will not survive.  I like that paradox.  It is a representative paradox of the kind Joan Didion might write in order to imply something weightier than words.  The power in Joan Didion's prose is evident beyond her singular style and terse technique.  How she  craftily imbues her prose with implication after implication makes her svelte novels feel heavy in your hands like doorstopper tomes.  One ruminates on, as much as reads, Joan Didion.

We know that Charlotte and her first husband, Warren Bogart, have an estranged daughter, Marin, raised by Charlotte and her second husband, Leonard Douglas, wanted by the F.B.I. for her terrorism.  She's nineteen in most of Grace Strasser Mendana's remembrance of Charlotte Douglas.  Nineteen like the youngest of the two Boston Marathon bombers.  But Marin didn't blow up the Boston Marathon.  Marin blew up the Transamerica building in San Francisco.  Left behind a tape explaining why.  The way a rebel parrot might explain why.

"All class enemies must suffer exemplary punishment.  When the fascist police think we are near we will be far away.  When the fascist police think we are far away we will be near ... We shall reply to repression with liberation.  We shall reply to the terrorism of the dictatorship with the terrorism of the revolutions," Marin intoned, and with a lisp we are told by Charlotte, from the tape.

We know that Marin caught the pungent whiff of revolucion when her parents lived in the fictitious, Central American nation of Boca Grande and let the house staff tend to her rearing.  Citizens of Boca Grande raising a norte americana child. Countries of constant rot and impending riot.

We know Marin's parents, Charlotte and Leonard, were probably arms dealers disguised as U.S. diplomats.  Except Charlotte, being Charlotte, wasn't cognizant of the fairly obvious fact that her second husband, Leonard, was involved in shady back room dealings with the power brokers of Boca Grande, supplying weapons and obfuscation under the watchful auspices of the U.S. government attempting to install by dubious means another regime in Central America.  Read Salvador sometime, Didion's later take on moral rot and political riot in Central America.

We know that Marin had gotten herself permanently high on the anti-imperialist propaganda that festered down there in Boca Grande.  Propaganda that was fueled in part by Marin's stepfather, a veritable tentacle of the U.S. military, that man, Leonard.  Idealistic Marin, looking for a just cause to believe in but finding none in her parents, adopted new parents -- an ideology -- and chose the local screeds of "the Brazilian guerilla theorist named Marighela" as her textbooks and personal guides.  In lieu of higher institutional learning, Marin began (covertly herself -- like stepfather, like stepdaughter) a crash course in guerilla tactics, taught behind the scenes and between the lines of A Book of Common Prayer, a philosophy taught by Grace Strasser Mendana's warring brother and son, men on opposing political sides in Boca Grande; men that Marin's mother, Charlotte, shacked up with -- both of them -- in the days leading to her death, when civil war erupted yet again in Earth's anus, Boca Grande.  Leonard and Grace tried to convince Charlotte to get the hell out of Boca Grande before the latest coup began, but Charlotte had a dinner to attend at the hotel restaurant that evening.  A dinner hosted by her for herself alone.  Which was Charlotte's last supper, so to speak, her grand finale of freedom before Boca Grande's airport was shut down by rebel factions for good.

"Charlotte made not enough distinctions.  She took people's words at face value."

Yet Marin made her distinctions.  Made her judgments.  And saw the worthlessness of her parent's face values; the worthlessness of their wealth.

We know Marin's end will be life in prison or in violent death.  But where is she in the interim?

"A man who described himself as a disillusioned Scientologist called Charlotte to say that Marin was under the influence of a Clear in Shasta Lake.  A masseuse at Elizabeth Arden called Charlotte to say that she had received definite word from Edgar Cayce via Mass Mind that Marin was with the Hunzas in the Himalayas.  The partially decomposed body of a young woman was found in a shallow grave on the Bonneville Salt Flats but the young woman's dental work differed conclusively from Marin's."  At least these peculiar strangers seemed to care about Marin's whereabouts.

"Fuck Marin".

Hard to fathom Charlotte uttered those words before being fatally shot in the crossfire of Boca Grande.  Was Charlotte wrong for launching such a callous invective against her only daughter?  Warren Bogart, Marin's biological father, said Charlotte was wrong about many things, but not about Marin, having been the first to say what Charlotte said about her.

The first to say, "Fuck Marin".

We know that soon after saying what Warren said about the daughter he rejected for her violent crimes, he died alone in a motel room.  So fuck Warren Bogart.  Good riddance was the general consensus regarding his death.  Readers of A Book of Common Prayer, therefore, need not anticipate a tender Douglas family reunion or reconciliation with tears.  Tear gas maybe, but not tears.

We know that the only player in Didion's grim novel, Grace Strasser Mendana, who met Marin, after her parents were dead and she was still hiding out from the F.B.I. in a cockroach-dive in Buffalo, would discover something tender, something transcendent, albeit discovered too late, upon meeting Marin.  Then Grace Strasser Mendana (named Grace for good reason), after what she learned about Marin and, more significantly, about herself, would also die.  From cancer.  And we grieve.  But we already knew this, didn't we, from the first few pages of A Book of Common Prayer?  Grace's fate.  Yet still we're sad.

Portrait of Joan Didion by Alison Perry

Knowing Grace was doomed.
Knowing Charlotte was doomed.
Knowing Charlotte's second husband, Leonard, never gave a shit.
Knowing Warren, Charlotte's first husband, always was a shit.
Knowing Marin had no chance in Hell or Boca Grande at a real childhood.
Knowing no one had a prayer is what's so sad.
Knowing all that, from the get-go, is sadder.

But knowing that bad endings begat bad beginnings in the bassackwards world of Boca Grande is barely half the sad story of A Book of Common Prayer.  Because Joan Didion is that good.  Relaying the bad news first and the bad news last, and whacking you repeatedly upside the head with all the bad news in between, yet keeping you guessing, still reading, still caring, thanks to Grace's dignified manner of eulogizing her misguided subjects, makes Joan's Didion's achievement as profound as the mystery of common prayer.

Read her.  Joan Didion.  And know.

Finding The Last Western by Thomas S. Klise at a Thrift Store for $1.49

The Last Western by Thomas S. Klise, the first and only novel he published (who is this guy, and why is this book so expensive to buy online?) was lost, but now is found.  Oh far be it for me to boast, but why exactly are people paying $60.00 online for a second hand, mass market paperback like the one I bought below, for a paltry $1.49.  Though I need to add, for sake of accuracy and honesty, that it was a 30% off Friday 4pm -- close, at the thrift store I regularly frequent, so the final sale price for my copy of The Last Western ended up being only $1.04 plus nine cents tax, for a total purchase price of $1.13.   By the looks of the creased spine and the minor frayed corners and signs of shelf wear and heavy use on its cover (though the copy is perfectly clean as far as I can tell) I'm thinking maybe I got ripped off paying $1.13 for this Argus Communications (A Division of DLM, Inc. / Allen, Texas 75002 U.S.A.) first printing of this mass market paperback.

Does anybody know why people pay so much online for a copy like this?  Why is it out of print if it's  in such demand.  Why doesn't Dzanc reissue it?  Or Dalkey Archive?  Or Green Integer?  Walter Miller was so impressed by the book, he wrote in his review in Commonweal as if he were speaking directly to Thomas S. Klise, writing,

"Thomas S. Klise, you have written more than a novel, you have written a revolution.  Not since the first time I read Moby Dick have I so enjoyed an American novel."

And that was just the blurb on the back of the book.  Look to the left at what Walter Miller is quoted as gushing on the front cover of the book.  The "turning point ... the final climax" in American literature! No wonder people who haven't found the book, as I have, for $1.13 at the thrift store, are willing to spend fifty, sixty bucks for it online.  Damn Walter Miller has got them all hyped up for it!  Is the hype deserved?  I'm so hyped, I'm afraid to open The Last Western, let alone read it, if it is indeed worth so much.  Should I?  I mean read it?  Get my sticky fingerprints all over the unknown, alleged masterpiece?  Or maybe I should just stare at it instead?  Be like The Man Who Stared at The Last Western like it were goats.  I'm perplexed.  Why is this novel so special?  Why is it rated so high on both Goodreads and LibraryThing?  As of April 19th, 2013, it has a 4.58 rating on LT.  Granted, less than forty people even own it there (it has twenty-five ratings on GR) but those who do, the ones who've read it, think very highly of it obviously, enough to stick their neck out for it with slews of five star ratings -- even though it's been out of print for nearly forty years.  Klise died four years after its publication, which probably accounts for some of its disappearance.  But it can't account for it all, can it?  Even so, the book is clearly alive.  Some people, I fear, who spent crazy money online for it recently, for The Last Western, may become crazed hearing that I bought it for only $1.13.  I hope it's safe what I'm doing, posting this post, saying I only spent $1.13 for it....

Did I say I bought it for only $1.13?  Oh dear, silly me, those damn decimal points, holy cow how they just up and jump two places to the left of their own volition sometimes.  Yeah, that's it.  I really bought this book for $113.  See how crazy for The Last Western I am?  I can't stand people who brag about paying an absurdly low sum for it at the thrift store.

Thanks to The BURIED Book Club on Goodreads for alerting me of this book, and to Jesse's Review which alerted Nathan, founder of The BURIED Book Club, in the first place.

Reassessing Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, A Personal Choice by Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess knew what he liked and why he liked it, which is a lot more than I can say about many of today's alleged critics so quick with their clichés -- "it was lyrical," or my unfavorite, "an evocative meditation on ______" -- that are absent of any originality or insight whatsoever.  Burgess, crusty curmudgeon he could be (ask on-the-cusp-of-being-nominated-for-the-National Book Award-and-Pulitzer-before-Burgess-butchered-him, Steve Erickson, in 1993!) was always original.  Always insightful.  Being an innovative novelist and being so well versed in contemporary trends and classic tastes, he knew quality writing wherever he encountered it; knew what made for great novels and what didn't, no matter how popular or obscure the book might be.  Most of the time.  He was flat out wrong about Steve Erickson.  But that's an editorial for another day....

Burgess' selections for Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, A Personal Choice (published in 1984), are often whimsical and just plain odd, eccentric picks indeed, perhaps included for sentimental as much as artistically warranted reasons?  Like when he chose ... Goldfinger? (1959) by Ian Fleming; or ... Bomber? (1970) by Len Deighton, to stand side-by-side with the gods Nabokov, Murdoch, Joyce?....

Burgess admitted as much in his introduction, where he offered persuasive rationale that was probably still too much of a stretch for snobs who must've been incredulous (if not outright incensed -- oooh that scoundrel, Anthony Burgess!) seeing when they opened their copy of Ninety-Nine Novels that ... James Bond? ... one-upped Lolita? ... poor precocious pre-teen child (hadn't she been abused enough already, Sir Anthony?), whose iconic novel named after her was inexplicably excluded from Ninety-Nine Novels.  Why oh why, Sir Anthony, did the Gormenghast novels and The Once and Future King make your arbitrary ("personal") list, but not ... The Lord of the Rings?

Nevertheless, I happen to like the oftentimes mystifying, idiosyncratic mix, the intermingling of breezy thrillers -- pure blasts to read -- with such serious lit'rachuh, and wish other critics could be just as quick to meld the proletariat masses of the genre-classes with the most respected of literature's elected on their lists -- much as FM disc-jockeys did with their playlists in FMs heyday, back before the Amazon-like mega-conglomerates seized control and segregated the airwaves, back when you could still hear the delicate sitar strumming of a Ravi Shankar segue beautifully and bizarrely into the metallic moan of "I.  Am.  Iron-man."

But on the flip side, before I read Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, A Personal Choice, I'd never heard of at least half of the wonderful writers Burgess included, and have since heeded his stellar advice and "discovered" their work for myself, and so owe the late great Anthony Burgess, even though his picks often peeve me, a deep debt of gratitude.

Thank you, Sir Anthony, for revealing to me C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers, a twelve novel sequence begun in 1940 and completed in 1970 that reads like a blue-collar Proust ...

Thank you, Sir Anthony, for Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy, 1960-65....

For Angus Wilson's largely forgotten novels as well (so forgotten why bother mentioning them here by name?), and for Wilson's introductory book of criticism on Emile Zola, published at a time in 1952 when Zola was still being snubbed by Great Britain....

Thank you, Sir Anthony, as I hope to one day "discover" even still the nearly completely unknown writer (excepting his YA novel, Tarka the Otter), Henry Williamson, and his fifteen volume opus, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, (1951-1969), that's potentially pricey to obtain, but worth wheeling and dealing for, sounds like....

Thank you yet again, Sir Anthony (¡muchos gracias, mi amigo!) for the day I hope is soon that I'll finally "discover" Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom I've heard raved about beyond just you....

Good grief, I could go on foaming at this keyboard forever, Sir Anthony, thanks to you.  Thanking you for unveiling to larger audiences, Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat; Henry Green's Loving; Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate; Robert Nye's Falstaff; William's Sansom's The Body, but I'll stop.

For those interested in reading a complete itemization of the books listed in Anthony Burgess' Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, A Personal Choice, and a lively discussion on nearly all of the books included, go here to a thread on a site that wasn't then, and still isn't now, majority-owned by Amazon.

Terse Take on Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

I think it's easier to understand Ozzy Osbourne on a cell phone with a bad connection and an irksome jackhammer going off behind you than it is to understand a single fucking sentence of Trainspotting.

Reading (and Loathing) Amazon.com: Get Big Fast by Robert Spector

Amazon.com: Get Big Fast by Robert Spector tells the scary, loathsome story of an even scarier and more loathsome company, Amazon, that in order to control, manipulate and monopolize everything in the known universe, including all-things-Retail, developed such a foul, exasperating and perverse case of blood lust for mergers and acquisitions, I daresay their insidious behavior would've shocked even the author, William Gaddis, who wrote the greatest satire ever written, JR, on consumerism, capitalism and corporate greed so run amok by a little twerp that everything the twerp touched got fucked up instantly for everybody else.  Why'd the twerp do it?  Because the twerp could do it, that's why.

That's the American Dream for you:  Creating Nightmares for Mom and Pop.

While Amazon.com: Get Big Fast does not yet tell the complete story of how Amazon began ruining it for once arguably great (never mind merely Good or okay) social booksites on the internet, and for independent booksellers everywhere, squeezing the life out of those stubborn, archaic brick-and-mortar store owners one by one, like they were so much pus being ejected out of zits on the twerp's big butt, we can only cross our fingers and hope that future, updated editions of the Amazon puff-piece (I mean biography, har), will.

Amazon.com: Get Big Fast shows in disturbing detail how it used to be a jungle out there, until Amazon paved it over.

Return Trip to Alphabetical Africa, a Linguistic Tour de Force by Walter Abish

(**note to my literally single-digits of regular and loyal readers out there, wherever you reside on this rotating orb of ours we share: the following is a revision, not an entirely new review, of an earlier, more linguistically- and alphabetically-challenged piece on Alphabetical Africa, originally posted in May 2011**)



Alphabetical Africa is one of the wittiest, most cleverly constructed novels I've ever read.  Here's why:  The first chapter, "A," only contains words that begin with the letter "a"; the second chapter, "B," only contains words beginning with either the letters "a" or "b"; and so on and so forth goes the rest of the novel, chapters C, D, E, F, G and on to chapter "Z".  Then, the novel starts erasing itself, so to speak, as it retreats from chapter "Z" -- the only chapter in the book where Walter Abish is "allowed" to use words beginning with every letter in the alphabet -- and backwards on through the incrementally reduced availability of letters in chapters Y, W, V, U, T, and so on, culminating where the novel began in the most hyper-restrictive chapter of the book, chapter "A", replete with paragraphs like the following nugget of alliterative awesomeness:

"After air attack author assumes Alva's asexuality affected African army's ack-ack accuracy, an arguable assumption, anyhow, army advances, annilihating antelopes, alligators and ants.  Admirable attrition admits Ashanti admiral as author all alone autographs Ashanti atlas, authenticating anthill actions.  Actually, asks Alva, are all Ashanti alike."

Alphabetical Africa's artifice is also artful. It's purposeful self-limits help make it one of the funniest "experimental" or "avant-garde" novels, or whatever you want to call these unconventionally structured novels that Walter Abish and other Oulipo-type writers tend to produce; novels whose narratives employ radically unorthodox structural or organizational devices in communicating their unusual message to the reader.  The structure, in fact, becomes, in whole or in part, the message being communicated, along with the story, and gives the novel a certain texture and depth, a sort of funky, surreal feel like a 3D drawing by Escher, that more conventionally styled novels can only dream of invoking.  Maybe I'm strange, but I think it's hysterical that the first person narrator of Alphabetical Africa can't appear in his novel until chapter "I" and then must disappear after the apex of chapter "Z" has been reached and the novel, having lost access to the complete English alphabet pertaining to the first letters of words, backtracks from chapter "I" to chapter "H", where it's goodbye to the "I" first person narrator, and welcome back, "author".

I'm aware that many readers might automatically turn their noses up at the label "avant garde" or "experimental," as it does, regrettably, tend to signify that the book labeled as such is just so precious ...  so cutting edge, conceived by the artsy-fartsy, pretentious, so highbrowed you can barely see their foreheads, hoity-toity, just plain stuck-up, literati-elect as (can you hear them like I do?) "pushing fiction beyond heretofore preconceived limits to lofty new horizons in literature; of such visionary grandeur and excellence, blah blah blah," or some other blurbish bullshit like that denoting next to nothing; when in fact all the book has "accomplished" is come up with some cutesy, minutely original contrivance or gimmick to coverup the fact of its fated (and deserved) remainder-pile-mediocrity, the sole foci of its promoters having been its supposed "innovaton" because solid, compelling storytelling and writing, it completely lacks.  House of Leaves, for instance, has taken a ton of abuse for allegedly being a hollow shell of a novel whose shallowness is disguised by its carnival of textual formatting, though I disagree vehemently (as I digress) and believe the artifice of House of Leaves only enhances its uniquely imaginative artistry ....

The artifice of Alphabetical Africa works brilliantly too.  Though, yes, "avant-garde" and "experimental" it is, it's nevertheless a novel experiment worth reading.  It's worth reading twice or three times too just to figure out what words Abish had to excise or replace with synonyms because of his letter limitations.  Not to mention the many "mistakes" he made in the writing, when he included words that began with, say, the letter "w" in chapter "D".  Were the mistakes made by Abish -- or his editors -- made on purpose?  I don't know.  Even so, occasional imperfections considered, the novel's a fascinating riot to read.  Abish's poetic prose rings true no matter how much, or how little, of the alphabet he has at his disposal.  His writing never sounds like he had to force it to fit inside the mould of his self-imposed artifice.  True, it's mildly uncomfortable at first, at least to this reader, reading non-stop alliteration for two and three pages at a spell, but you get used to it eventually, and it feels natural, like watching sub-titles of some gorgeous foreign film and becoming so entranced by the movie that you no longer even notice the subtitles on the screen.  Life is Beautiful was like that for me.

So what's Alphabetical Africa about already?

About Africa.  Alphabets.  Angolans.  Animals.  Alligators.  Ants.  Antelopes.  Archaeologists.  Alva.  Alva's abduction.  Alex and Allen's articulate arguments about Alva's awful abduction.   As in who done the dirty deed?  Though (ooops) see how I just violated my impromptu, Walter Abish-inspired, self-imposed, seemingly unending "a" alliteration?  It's hard trying to emulate, or pay homage, to Alphabetical Africa!  So I'll just keep on praising it to anybody who'll listen.  Did I mention there's this Tanzanian transvestite traveling through Alphabetical Africa's tremendous text too?

Life at Happy Knoll by John P. Marquand

Life at Happy Knoll is an understated satire by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist I suspect few readers bother reading today.  Though in his day, around the time he won the 1938 Pulitzer for The Late George Apley, he was commercially successful and critically well received.  So it's a minor shame that, not dusting off the cobwebs of a forgotten novel by John P. Marquand every now and then, in order to enjoy his mid-century skewering of double-talking high society WASPs.  Of folks fixated on protecting their precious domestic insularity and supremely shallow social values -- common themes in Marquand's novels and especially Life at Happy Knoll -- that made his primarily WASP audience perhaps chuckle and gasp simultaneously in discomfiting recognition of itself.

Happy Knoll and Hard Hollow country clubs are in a constant letter writing battle (that's all the novel is -- the correspondence of rival boards of governors pandering to potential new members to join their country club and not that other one) as they compete for new residents recently relocated into their Revolutionary Road-like community.  Where Richard Yates rarely strayed in his strict adherence to bleak realism, Marquand routinely ventured mildly over the top in his less stringent realism.  Cadillac owners, for instance, are de rigueur in Happy Knoll and Hard Hollow, though less prestigious car owners are tolerated even as they're privately derided to whatever degree their set of wheels happens to correspond to whatever lower notch on some agreed upon and yet arbitrary country club continuum that measures the virtue most important to them -- status.

Marquand gleefully showed us how his country-clubbers would, of course, and regardless of a member's real or, more importantly, perceived status, never think of bad-mouthing a member for owning a lower class of automobile than their Daddy's Caddy, because that's just not -- obviously meaning it most assuredly is -- how Happy Knoll or Hard Hollowites behave socially.  Right!  Marquand mocked them, gifted and deft as he was conveying their subtle double-speak, double standards and general snootiness.  Marquand's country club masses are too deluded by their own hypocrisy and masks to remember they're all merely average achievers at best, and in no position whatsoever to be judging anybody within or without the narrow-minded strictures of what amounts to their stunted development, these supposed adults stuck in their extended adolescence for decades removed from their proms, rehashing the petty jealousies and insecurities of their high school cliques.

Life at Happy Knoll was Mad Men-hooks-up-with-Desperate Housewives half-a-century before either iconic Stateside television show aired, only the novel's not as serious as the former or as funny as the latter.  Mildly amusing, never savage or too outrageous, this semi-serious, mostly lightweight (but not inane) satire of Marquand's, remains a relevant class commentary of 1950s Americana.  While Marquand's novels have fallen out of fashion, the contemptible country club hubris he chronicled endures.  Or rather it has, in fact, become more pervasive in this now mediocre yet entitled "culture" of ours that's become as much the Happy United Knolls or Hard United Hollows as the 21st century United States....

Marquand first published Life at Happy Knoll near the end of his career in recurring installments (1955-1957) for Sports Illustrated.  The magazine's golf aficionados made the series a success, and soon Marquand's publisher cashed in on the country club craze, releasing the complete series as a short epistolary novel the summer of 1957.

A good introduction to The Novels of John P. Marquand.

The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle

Man, I dig The Fan Man, man, the way I dug Spinal Tap, man.  The Fan Man is Spinal Tap for hippies, man.  A spoof about hippies, man, or one hippie, Horse Badorties, man.  The book is a raucous, politically incorrect, purposely offensive and misogynistic, hysterical satire, man.  It is appalling, yet so appealing, man.  That Horse Badorties thinks he runs a music academy that is just a front for luring fifteen year old "chicks" he yearns to score with, man, back at his disgusting pad, man (when he has a pad and isn't homeless, man) is the appalling aspect, man, while watching him act so clumsily and cluelessly that he can't complete the deal with the underage chickadees, man, is the appealing aspect, man, when he foils himself in his endearing stupidity, man.  Horse Badorties is so clueless, man, he doesn't know he's a clueless man.

I think "Laat Maar Waaien" means "The Fan Man,"
man.  Like whoa!

He uses the word "man" in every utterance, every sentence, man, the way Valley Girls used to use the word "like," man.  Like all the time, man.  Like, way too much, man.  Like it is so not bitchen, man, how often "man" is used, man, in William Kotzwinkle's, The Fan Man.  Like he never stops saying the word "man" in every sentence of the entire novel, man, so that after a while, man, reading about Horse Badorties and his goomba-ish absurd shenanigans in The Fan Man, man, you find yourself starting to talk like him not just inside your head, man, but to your wife and kids, man.  To your dog, man.  It's so sad, man, talking like that around the house nonstop, man.

Horse Badorties' hippie vernacular, man, becomes damn near impossible, man, to get out of your fucking head, man, once its gotten inside you, the fucking infection of hippie inflection, man, like some language-hippie-virus, man, gone global.  That voice of his, of Horse Badorties, man, gets stuck inside you, man, just like that wretched Taylor Swift song gets stuck inside you once you've heard it even just once, man.  Weeeeee.  Are never ever ever ever ever, getting back together, weeeeeee, are never ever ever ever EVER.  See what I mean, man?  Book is a far out trip, man.  Gonna heed The Fan Man's advice, man, of Horse Badorties, and go buy me some "Peruvian mango skins," man, to like cleanse the inorganic toxins out of my aura, man, so I'll only receive the purest, most precious and positively freshest vibes from the cosmos, man.  You dig, man?

Place Last Seen by Charlotte McGuinn Freeman

A child with Down syndrome gets lost in Desolation Wilderness in the high country west of Lake Tahoe on a family day hike in early autumn.   Like most kids, Maggie enjoys hiding in the house from her parents.   She's a particularly gifted, stubborn hider.  So saying she "got lost" -- as if she'd become disoriented and couldn't locate the whereabouts of her older brother and parents as they picnicked beside an alpine lake in the crisp Sierra Nevada air, isn't exactly accurate, since Maggie got "lost" on purpose.  All it took was a second when her father turned his attention toward a lodgepole pine, the kind of pines most common at this high altitude, to discreetly pee behind.  Maggie, more observant than most in her life realize, takes off at the chance, wandering cross country in just a minute into the rugged terrain to play her favorite game, hide-and-go-seek.

So of course Maggie wouldn't respond when her parents shouted her name.  Perhaps a "typical" child free of Down syndrome's complications would've come out from her hiding place momentarily, once she heard her parents initial unconcerned shouts become increasingly frantic, and the realization set in that she'd be in big big trouble if she didn't stop hiding immediately.  Upon revealing herself, the mother of that ideal "typical" child would've no doubt semi-seriously scolded her for scaring them like that, able to breathe now and relax.

But Maggie is not a "typical" child.  Her parents can rarely relax.  She's never in her life quit a game of hide-and-go-seek until somebody finds her in her hiding spot; never quit even if the seekers in the game have yelled out "Olly olly oxen free!" over and over.  Maggie wouldn't quit hide-and-go-seek even after hours of what by then were her parents' and brother's panicked shouts and cries, imploring her to please come out .... But there was no quit or coming out in Maggie (assuming she wasn't injured and still within earshot) for even as twilight's alpenglow settled serenely on the impassive grandeur of the mountain's minarets and forested ridges, Maggie remained a no-show.  Apparently she played hide-and-go-seek more passionately than most.

Besides fear, hope can be one of the most excruciating emotions parents must cope with and endure in search-and-rescue scenarios like Maggie's.  And guilt.  Blame.  Impatience.  Anger ....  Charlotte McGuinn Freeman nails to a tee all that inner and outer turmoil, interpersonal tensions, and constant race-against-the-clock pressure as if she were the desperate, frustrated parents (and compassionate, though often bumbling, volunteers of the SAR team too) experiencing hope and the too frequent false hope (of dead-end leads) and anguish herself.

Maggie was last seen by a small lake in Desolation Wilderness.  She was wearing a jacket and jeans.  And a cap.  She's an adorable little girl.  She's developmentally and intellectually disabled.  She doesn't realize that she is lost and in grave danger.  There's an early winter storm moving in.  We have to find her fast.  Here's her picture.  Have you seen her?

Imagine if that were you.  Your child.

Few first time novelists attempting to sell their first novel (and to hopefully sell enough copies of it to at least earn their likely meagre advance) would dare the devastating denouement of Maggie's spiritually profound story that Charlotte McGuinn Freeman successfully dramatized here, in her powerful debut, the Picador paperback original, Place Last Seen.

I should disclose that I have an adorable little girl whose nickname is "Meggie" and who also has Down syndrome, and that I've hiked extensively throughout my life in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  I know Desolation Wilderness pretty well.  It's called "Desolation" for a decidedly succinct descriptive reason.  So, obviously then, it's probably easy to imagine that I identified a ton with Maggie and her family, though thankfully I didn't relate with her search-and-rescue.  I'm not embarrassed saying that Charlotte McGuinn Freeman made me cry.  Like a baby.  So real, so true and heartfelt, though not sappy and sentimental like some stupid Hallmark Channel fare, was her exciting novel.  But man it was excruciating to read.  I suspect Freeman's novel probably wouldn't be as evocative or resonate with others like it stirred deep inside me, who don't already have a personal connection with or at least know a "Maggie" or a "Meggie" in their lives.

In nosing around the internet for more information on Charlottle McGuinn Freeman, I remember reading somewhere that Place Last Seen was originally conceived as her theological thesis.  Knowing nothing of Freeman's theology or faith, it's still easy to speculate and to see how visceral an analogy or potent an object lesson Maggie's story could've made in her thesis:  How a lost and helpless little girl, completely unaware that she's lost and helpless because of her intellectual disability -- and in grave, immediate danger as a result -- symbolizes humankind's inescapable, impending plight.  Death.  And not merely of the body, but the death of our hopes, if not our outright minds, through misinformation (false leads), ignorance and fear; or the crueler death of our spirits crushed by like endless tsunamis of suffering, disappointment and despair.  Pure conjecture all that, as again I don't know exactly what Freeman's faith or theology is rooted in, other than it seems strangely -- to me, a non-practicing though fateful absurdeist -- appealing and, who knows, maybe even redemptive and somehow healing.

No Exit -- "The Concentration City" of J.G. Ballard's

"The Concentration City" (1957) is one Hell of a story.  That Ballard named his leads Franz and Gregson and set certain bureaucratic procedural crime dramas around them made me think immediately of The Metamorphosis, but I'm not positive Ballard was intentionally riffing off Kafka here.  And regarding Concentration City's history there's multiple mentions to a time "before the Foundation" millions of years ago, which seems to be a gracious nod in Isaac Asimov's direction.

Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird.  Any available space is already occupied with construction.  So he hatches a plan with Gregson not so much to escape Concentration City but to ride the commuter train, a "Supersleeper" that connects the various Sectors and Federations of the city, West for as long as necessary in order to find "Free Space," as the going rate for space is a pricey $1/cubic ft.  After days on the "sleeper" Franz passes slums where space is as low as five cents/cubic ft., but those neighborhoods have been walled off so that no one can enter and those unlucky inhabitants who live there cannot leave.  No exit indeed.

Franz discovers that streets and levels of Concentration City go up to the millions, like 3,456,877th Street, another fascinating concept of Ballard's, and one he uses to great effect in conveying what is the most likely location of Concentration City.  It's like New York, Mumbai, and Hong Kong all combined, to roughly the hundreth power; this Concentration City so built up and out that each floor of its buildings are now levels of the interconnected city, with perhaps only elevated alleyways separating the buildings, whose passageways through the floors of the buildings form what I gather is some semblance of a 3-D city, a matrix, built out in every conceivable direction infinitely.  Ballard uses "infinitely" more than once.  Franz passes his time on the train drawing dreams, but they're not his.  

Anyway, after about ten days of nonstop riding on the train, Franz learns he is now heading East.  WTF? he asks the crew, who then inform him that the train he's on has always been heading East.  Huh?  When he got on is was heading West.  And when he returns to where he hopped on, at the mainline terminal three weeks later, how is it possible that it is now the same day as when he first left?  Either time folded or there is no time in Concentration City.  Ballard is building on his theory of time he began in "Escapement"(1956): that the future is now and the past may be present, on, from what I've gathered in commentaries, is his "time's malleable continuum".  Dreams and some unconscious element (collective memories?) backlight this story too, and from what I've gathered will eventually be the main stage of several of his later stories.

Beware "The Pyros" of "The Concentration City" -- nice ironic twist of Ballard's -- of those who wish to set fire to the tenements of Hell; but beware more the Fire Police, who'll send you to The Slums, where you can never leave.  As if anybody ever leaves Concentration City.  Whispers, or maybe shouts, obviously, of Sartre, abound in this escapist -- but at times startlingly profound -- fun read.  Easily his best story so far.

~ short film of The Concentration City

~~~~~

I also pulled Julio Cortázar off the shelf recently and read his story "Axolotl", a bizarre and intriguing glimpse at how when we take an obsession to its extreme, we might literally become one with our obsession.  There exist definite threads of similarity in thematic concepts between Ballard and Cortázar that perhaps I'll explore later in a future post (although I should add that perhaps, if we're to take Ballard at his vision, that future post of mine may already exist, if not in the here and now, then perhaps in the past).

Getting Attuned to the Surreality of J.G. Ballard's "Prima Belladonna"

I'm proceeding slowly through The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard in 2013, and hope to have at least something to share on each story eventually.  There's potential spoilers below.  First story up for study is  "Prima Belladonna" from 1956.

"Prima Belladonna" is told by an unnamed narrator as a reminiscence.  A recollection of a long-ago, idealized time known in his culture's history as "The Recess," that "world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer..." that lasted for a decade.  People worked only a few hours per day during this era of ennui, assuming our unnamed leading man is any indicator of the cultural norm, spending their hours not in labor but instead on balconies with beer, playing i-Go, a game described as "decelerated chess," as if chess (for the lay person, not a pro) wasn't slow enough already.

Ballard's got that wry wit going on repeatedly; I really enjoy his humor; the story is constant creative smarts and clever fun.  Ballard could also be mocking a particular strata in society with this sluggish setting known as "The Recess".  And that it lasted for ten years, much as recess in school -- or in the courts -- lasts oftentimes for ten minutes, points to parody.  There may also be some possible "i-Go"/Iago wordplay connotations, but I'm not going to work that hard right now to highlight them.

The title is perfect for the content of this story.  There's a diva, Jane Ciracylides, a "specialty singer" who may be a "mutant," performing in the casino lounge at Vermillion Sands.  She possesses "insect eyes" and "patina-golden skin," a body of breathtaking brilliant light -- "a walking galaxy of light" -- to die for.  She is the "Prima Belladonna" of the story title, though the title refers specifically to the "Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna," an exotic spider used in the pollination of a rare, highly prized, plant.

Before our leading man meets Jane Ciracylides (his business is across the way from Vermillion Sands), we meet him working in his music shop.  He doesn't sell ordinary instruments from any reality of ours.  Of course he doesn't.  Not in J.G. Ballard's reality, his tweaked surreality  So there's no tubas or flutes; no trombones; no pianos.  Instead, he sells plants: "Choro-flora".  Stuff like "soprano mimosas, azalea trios" or "mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir".  Each plant's "audio" can be switched on, like a radio or an i-Pod, so customers can hear what the plant sounds like prior to purchase.  You wouldn't download a song without sampling it first, would you?

The music store's -- and our story's -- centerpiece, is the "Khan-Arachnid orchid".  A rare specimen capable of twenty-four octaves, and invaluable also for keeping the music shop, a veritable greenhouse of choro-flora, in tune.  Plants, remember, like most musicians and especially prima donna opera singers, can be very temperamental at times, capable of "twelve-tone emotional storms,"and need ameliorative assistance of SO₂ or a "fluoraldehyde flush" to bring them back from potentially lethal precipices of "audio-vegetative armageddon".

Our narrator and Jane Ciracylides find an immediate attraction, that first afternoon she strolls into his store, eyeing his merchandise.  She invites him to her concert that evening, and soon they're dating, and eventually move in together.  But the relationship is doomed.  For sweet Jane cheats at more than just i-Go.  In retrospect, considering that explicit and shocking scene of what I suppose can best be called "cross pollination," witnessed by the dumbfounded narrator when he came home early to his music shop -- the story's climax you could say -- isn't it obvious that Jane Ciracylides from the time they first met in the store, was after something more than merely him?

~~~~~

Some favorite ideas not mentioned above from the story:

~ "Perhaps I'd listened to too many flowers".
~ Tchaikovsky section in store, popular with tourists.
~ The Khan-Arachnid orchid going "all ultra sonic," meaning the music shop owner would soon be getting complaints from all the dog owners in the area.
~ The concept that a plant's music could attract predators, whether "sonic, Emperor scorpions" or prima belladonnas with insect eyes.

~~~~~

I don't know offhand if studies of the positive effect of classical music on plants had been conducted by 1956 (just haven't bothered to google it) but if they had, I wonder if the seed of the idea for "Prima Belladonna" came to Ballard as a means of turning such a study upside down, and his conceptualizing of what the negative effects of classical plants on human(oid)s might be.  Conjecture.

And how prescient was Ballard's i-Go game, suggestive just in its very name, of our present day communicative and entertainment gadgets most of us now own and take for granted.

For more, here's A Jungian Take on Vermillion Sands, of which "Prima Belladonna" plays an important part.

He Was A Champion

I originally posted this piece in Oct. 2011 as They Are The Champions. But I'm reposting it again this evening in honor of the young man of seventeen (back row, third from right) -- my grandfather, pictured in 1932 -- who passed away peacefully on Jan. 1st, 2013.  I'm so thankful I got to say goodbye to him in person the morning of New Year's Eve, 2012.  He was impossibly slim and weak by then, but still so lucid, still so "there" -- amazing for a man less than three months shy of his 98th birthday -- and he still had a firm grip as he shook my hand as I got up to go, saying "thanks for dropping by, Brent, it was good seeing you."  I nodded at him and couldn't help but cry.  It was great seeing you, Grampa!  All those years you demonstrated personal sacrifice and perseverance through so many tough times.  What a great man you were -- understatement of the millennium.  Missing you greatly, Grampa.

Edwin Kneisly:  March 29th, 1915 ~ Jan. 1st, 2013 

Depression-era high school basketball team championship photo: Eldon, Missouri

My grandfather (third from right, standing) played center at 6'0'' on his high school basketball team.  Back in those almost antique days, circa 1932, there was a "jump ball" after every made basket.  No fast breaks.  No jump shots.  No slam dunks. No Hoop Dreams.  No recruiting.  No March Madness.  No NBA lockouts or prima donnas. Just pure basketball, in all its glorious and fundamental simplicity. My grandfather, who will turn 97 in March and is the lone surviving member of his team, has recounted many times the strange game that won them the championship by a score of 9 to 6. I've paraphrased his account below:

Eldon's opponent thought they could win the championship game by stalling, holding the ball for several (what must have been oh so embarrassingly uneventful) minutes each possession before attempting a shot.  Keep in mind there were no shot clocks back in 1932; a team could take twenty-four minutes to shoot if they wanted.  But Eldon's adversary's slow-down strategy backfired and the tables got turned on them; when, early in the second half, with Eldon already ahead by two points, the score 8 to 6, my grandfather got fouled and stepped to the free throw line.  He made the first free throw but missed the second, "I could feel myself shaking so," he's said many memorable times (and I cherish each time he's said it).  But he got the rebound off his own missed free throw; so, possession remained Eldon's.  Since three-point shots didn't exist in 1932, Eldon, with a three point lead, found itself with a "two possession lead," meaning that even if their opponent got the ball again, they'd still have to get it at least one more time after that, and meanwhile hold Eldon scoreless in the interim, in order to have a chance to win or tie.

"After I got that rebound, our coach called time out and told us to just hold the ball on offense.  He said if they want to stall on us and play like that, like a bunch of [expletives]," my grandfather chuckled, in remembrance, "Then he said lets show them how stalling is properly done!"

Eldon showed them properly all right, holding the ball -- and the lead -- for the rest of the game.  State championship to Eldon, Missouri, even though they didn't score a measly ten points!

The largest of the trophies pictured still sits on my grandfather's nightstand, in his assisted-care room.

My grandfather's coach (pictured standing, far right) -- shrewd coach if there ever was one -- once advised my grandfather before an important game to run non-stop no matter what, to never stand still in the post, because he'd heard their opponent's center smoked two packs a day, and figured if my grandfather wore him out in the first half up and down the court, back-and-forth constantly beneath the basket (the phrase "in the paint" hadn't been coined back then, as there was no painted area extending fifteen feet from the baseline to the basket), never stopping for a second, that the other team's center, a six-foot-five giant (a Manute Bol by 1932 standards) would get so winded he'd not be able to recover in the second half, since he smoked so much.

"Coach was right," Grampa said.  "He couldn't move to save his life in the second half; his coach was yelling at him something fierce.  We just smiled but didn't let them see.  We pulled away in the second half and won with ease."

Infinite Jest: Some Brief "Year of Glad" Observations, part I

Beginning with the first sentence of Infinite Jest, Wallace is outlining some of its core themes:  Detachment, disembodiment, depersonalization, all resulting in disorientation -- a possible source, if I may borrow my LT friend, zenomax's, idea -- of the "realities behind the realities" in Infinite Jest.

Seated at the conference table for his admissions interview to get into Univ. of AZ, Hal Incandenza, in observing the three Deans seated nearby, does not "know which face belongs to whom."  He is uncertain of basic points of reference, where his position is in relation to others, for instance: CTs (his surrogate mouthpiece) location may be in the room, seated "to what I hope is my immediate right" (boldness mine).  Hope?  Hal doesn't know for sure.  Is Hal really "in here," or deceiving himself?

Hal says he is "in here" -- in the conference room -- but he isn't confident nor in control of his body: "I believe I appear normal" (boldness mine).  You believe, Hal?  You mean you're not able to just know?

"Normal," what for most of us is autonomic behavior in a meeting: appearing pleasant w/an approachable demeanor, appropriately crossing our legs and arms, making eye contact, following the give-and-take of a conversations natural cues, aren't automatic responses at all for Hal.  The communication and appearance problem of Hal's, in fact, is so obvious to staff at E.T.A. that he's been coached on how to "appear normal" for this important meeting, and w/not very successful results.  Because just his silence is abnormal and increasingly awkward-in-the-extreme, in an admissions meeting when Hal himself (and not his surrogate-mouthpiece-coach, C.T.) is supposed to be selling himself w/his own voice, showcasing his strengths and spotlighting why he should be selected for admission into the university.  It's an interview, Hal!  The idea is to talk, right?

But Hal is so far gone, he can't talk intellligibly, he's essentially attempting to act like a human being participating in a university admissions meeting, rather than just being a human being ... being himself.  But who is he?  Who is Hal?  Does he even know?  How can he when he's become disembodied from himself, disconnected from the reality of his circumstances?  He thinks he knows what he isn't, as he'll protest later in the chapter that "I am not a machine," but he has more in common at this lowest point in his life with a machine; with his namesake 9000 series computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey infamy, for that matter, than he does with just being ... just being Hal (whoever that is), the human being.

Hal is most assuredly a veritable machine at this point in the novel, and just as computers aren't always programmed for every possible contingency in a crisis, so neither has Hal been coached/programmed thoroughly enough to survive this fateful, forever life-altering, crisis.

Hal had contradicted himself a year earlier, Nov. 3rd, Y.D.A.U., regarding his not being a machine, in one of his Big Buddy sessions (pp. 117-118), where he mentored pre-teen students on life and tennis at E.T.A., selling his younger cohorts on the idea that the tennis drills and repetitions of E.T.A. life are vitally necessary so that your muscle's movements "sink and soak" into your "hardware, the C.P.S.  The Machine language ... The Machine language of muscles" (boldness again mine). What he's describing is a body and mind becoming so conditioned to stimuli (the 3-D dynamics of tennis) that thought-reactions cease, replaced by autonomic responses, much as a computer is programmed by endless repetitive data in order to "react" to input.

In the essay Wallace wrote on Tracy Austin's autobiography, I believe it's titled "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," he related how disappointed he was by her (whom he'd once had a teenage crush on, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, something to the effect of) "banal analytical" ability.  She wrote in cliches and surface insights, and Wallace, expecting more from her, theorized her lack of depth was because the 100% of her body and mind that she had to exert 24/7 into tennis since she was a youngster, learning to turn her mind and muscle's movements into freed-of-thought, autonomic reactions, had drastically reduced, if not entirely eliminated, her ability to think or analyze except inside the rectilinear confines of the tennis court and its practiced cliches -- in that context of drills and repetitions.  Wallace lamented that it was as if Tracy Austin's ability to critically think outside of the narrow focus of tennis did not exist for her, and could not because of her early formative years of hyper-conditioning.  Which is the same kind of conditioning Hal and his fellow inmate-students underwent.

So Far Gone: A Novel by Paul Cody

Mental illness and mass murder.  The death penalty for a perpetrator who was grotesquely victimized by those he murdered.  Hints of satanic ritual abuse (which could just as easily have been Jack Connor's delusions or dreams rather than memories), though the very real psychological abuse and daily double-binds he suffered at the controlling hands of his sadistic grandmother were just as satanic, and certainly the most destructive and damning forces in the long sad haul of his sorry, isolated existence (I won't call it a life), that he endured in a bleak house that might as well have been Death Row.

Is it seriously possible to empathize with this immature and mentally ill man who killed his grandmother and parents?  Probably not.  Not even when we see how his parents regularly threatened him with yet another psychiatric month-long incarceration at the local institution if he didn't shape up, and stop shuffling around late at night in his dreary attic room, keeping them awake with worry or driving them crazy, as if they needed any further assistance in the crazy department.  Yet Paul Cody accomplishes this impossible feat, using "eyewitness" vignettes from a multitude of sources who knew him in school or from the psychiatric hospital, in rendering the decades-long process it took for Jack Connor to become that irreparably damaged human being capable of then being that automatic monster the police and media made of him, after the fact.  But Jack Connor was not a psychopath.

Cody gave a knowing nod to Denis Johnson's first novel, Angels, and to Joan Didion, quoting both as a preface to his novel.  Fans of either Johnson or Didion might be already predisposed toward appreciating a complexly disturbing novel like Cody's as I was, which is not to say that Cody, while certainly skilled as a storyteller, is as accomplished a writer as they are.  Regardless, So Far Gone is still unforgettable, if uncomfortable, to read and then contemplate, considering how the murders might've been prevented or how Jack Connor, like unknown numbers of mentally ill, fall through the system's cracks, especially in light of too many recent mass murders in the news.

A Brief Glimpse Back: Memorable Reads of 2012.

Battleborn ~ Claire Vaye Watkins
I've a strong affinity for stories set in deserts.  Most collected here occupy Death Valley and Las Vegas.  Watkins confronts the mythology surrounding her infamous father's past with most likely more mythology, but also autobiography, though they're so enmeshed it's not possible to untangle her crafty confabulations.  Her debut is generally good and sometimes genuinely great, but falls flat a few times too.  More here.

Black Light: A Novel ~ Galway Kinnell
Another story set in the desert, this time half a world away, in Iran.  A man named after Persia's mythological king, Jamshid (of which mythology Kinnell mines in his anti-hero time and again), so fed up with his dissappointing life, lashes out in an impulsive instant -- a horrible mistake -- and flees his crime for the rest of his life, if a nomad existence on the run can still be called "life".  The version I read was altered by Kinnell in 1980, following the Iranian revolution.  Originally publication: 1966.  Kinnell, being a poet, had a distinct advantage over Claire Vaye Watkins, in expressing physical as well as metaphysical realities existing in an arid wilderness.  His book is richer than Watkins' (whom I nevertheless enjoyed) by far.  More here.

Blue Nights ~ Joan Didion
The desert-like desolation of a mother's grief, having lost her only (adopted) child w/in eighteen months after losing her husband.  Devastating.  From the 60s - 90s, Didion made great understated art (Play it as it Lays) or artful understated outrage (Salvador) or understated artful disillusion (take your pick from any of her essay collections; I'd pick The White Album), but now for the last decade she's been making pure art, employing something from each of her singular oeuvres, out of her deeply personal pain.  Not yet reviewed.

The Book of Fantasy ~ Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, editors
Fabulous anthology.  Fantastic.  Three good friends, the Argentine luminaries listed above, debated what they thought were the best "fantastic" and ghost stories, and in 1940 the first version of their anthology was released.  They'd revise it a couple more times in later editions over the ensuing thirty-six years, adding something here, removing something there, but through it all its remained a stellar anthology, with its idiosyncratic mix of literary heavyweights mingled prominently with scores of interesting Latin American unknowns.  More here.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why ~ Laurence Gonzales
Gonzales analyzes psychological and physiological factors in determining what the differences are for those who live and for those who die in extreme wilderness situations.  It's a fascinating, though not solely scientific, study of survival.  Not yet reviewed.

Destination: Void by Frank Herbert
Prose that's probably too dense, science and speculation since proved fantasy, but some of its ideas (1965-66) either beat Kubrick's and Clarke's iconic collaboration (1964-1968) to the punch, or coincided with them.  Herbert here certainly prefigures the images of the first Matrix.  But I'm a biased Herbert fan since childhood, I'll confess.  More here.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Could just as easily been titled The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Empire, though its focus is mostly on its fall.  Brief review here.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace ~ D.T. Max
Will link my review soon.

Masks of the Illuminati ~ Robert Anton Wilson
Works as a nice introduction to thinly veiled fictionalized versions (RAWs visions) of freemasonry, secret societies and what "illumination" might mean in an esoteric context, mixing psychology, philsophy, literature, religions and mysticism into a whimsical stew of knowledge.  It's basically a mystery or detective story, set on a sometimes-spoofish, sometimes-serious, always-elaborately-constructed gnostic stage.  More here.

Outer Dark ~ Cormac McCarthy
The muted light not quite able to filter down to the floors of an Appalachian forest; it's overrall effect of eerie otherworldliness, reminded me a lot of Chateau 'd Argol.  The uncertainty of the brother's and sisters circumstances -- and that of their child's -- whether they are being pursued or the one who pursues, or both, as much running from themselves as each other, journeying but never arriving, helps maintain that mysterious momentum, that dark air of confusion and intrigue I so enjoyed in Chateau 'd Argol as well.  Not yet reviewed.

Place Last Seen ~ Charlotte McGuinn Freeman
A child w/Down syndrome gets lost in the vast Desolation Wilderness of the Sierra Nevada.  Will search-and-rescue teams locate her in time, before an early October snowstorm moves in?  The novel was originally conceived as Charlotte Freeman's theological thesis.  It's a non-didactic, excruciating study of human suffering, asking how much suffering can a person of faith withstand before their faith erodes?  Is faith in God, next to the reality of evil and human suffering, mutually exclusive one to the other, or can they legitimately coexist? I'm thinking fans of Stewart O'Nan's, Songs for the Missing, would like this novel too.  Not yet reviewed.

Rubicon Beach ~ Steve Erickson
As good a writer as Erickson is, he should be more widely read.  In Rubicon Beach he's a mixture of what's best in the writing of Philip K. Dick and David Foster Wallace.  Posted about it here.

So Far Gone: A Novel ~ Paul Cody
Mental illness and mass murder.  The Death penalty for a perpetrator who was grotesquely victimized by those he murdered.  Is it seriously possibly to ever empathize with a man who killed his grandmother and parents?  Paul Cody accomplishes this impossible feat, and gives a knowing nod to Denis Johnson's first novel, Angels, and to Joan Didion, quoting both to begin his novel.  Paul Cody is not as great a writer as either, but So Far Gone is still unforgettable, if uncomfortable, to contemplate and read.  Not yet reviewed.

Quake ~ Rudolf Wurlitzer
L.A. gets pulverized in the Big One.  What fun!

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

Even had I not already known the particulars regarding the real-life death of author Claire Vaye Watkins' mother, or how "Razor Blade Baby" got her name, I'm positive Battleborn's opening sentence would've still jolted me.  Claire Vaye Watkins' gallows humor knows no bounds, and even though there's little amusing about suicide or the wild-eyed image of an impulsive Charles Manson abruptly "assisting" in a difficult delivery with a rudimentary scalpel, operating in unsanitary, squalid quarters out at some now long-since-mythologized Death Valley "Ranch," I can't help but laugh, disarmed as I am by Watkins' deadpan delivery.  A delivery that often zips with wit, hooks and puns.  Fun puns you don't see coming, ones that wallop you, as in the first (and I think her best) story, "Ghosts, Cowboys," a fictive/autobiographical rumination on beginnings both personal and universal in the history of the wild Wild West.

"The curse of the Comstock Lode had not yet leaked from the silver vein, not seeped into the water table.  The silver itself had not yet been stripped from the mountains, and steaming water had not yet flooded the mine shafts.  Henry T.P. Comstock ... had not yet lost his love Adelaide ... who drowned in Lake Tahoe.  He had not yet traded his share of the lode for a bottle of whiskey and an old, blind mare, not yet blown his brains out with a borrowed revolver near Bozeman, Montana.

Boom times."

Excuse me while I see stars and rise slowly off the mat.

Other times, however, I'm sorry to say, as in "Wish You Were Here," Watkins, rather than booming, is firing blanks.  The story opens sounding more like an outline than polished prose.  "It begins with a man and a woman.  They are young ... They fall in love.  They marry.  They have a child."  I suppose her staccato style throughout the story conveys an approximation of Marin's disjointed thinking, her confusion and anxiety on the cusp of becoming a mother and how depersonalized, perhaps, her pregnancy is causing her to feel, especially in relation to her husband who, "Before bed -- when once he would have touched her -- he leans down and speaks to her midsection," but the start-stop choppiness of the writing itself, and not just the choppiness of Marin's emotions and interiority, are annoying without relief.  The story, unfortunately, is one of the more irritating stories I've read.  Marin feels (she sure feels an awful lot here) that the new tiny town she and her husband moved to in the desert recently, "with its city traffic whispering like the sea" (and what an unusually pedestrian, uninspired simile for Watkins -- "city traffic whispering like the sea") "tries too hard".  I don't think it's just the town that is trying too hard in "Wish You Were Here."  Thankfully, the majority of Watkins' stories are good enough they needn't bother trying so hard.

Case in point:  "The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past," in which all three delineated vagaries of the story title's "past," seeping out in the sordid lives of the characters employed by, or who manage, the Cherry Patch Ranch, Nevadan outpost of legalized harlotry, mere inches beyond the Clark County line where prostitution remains outlawed, flow and intertwine with seamless ease.

Darla is Michele's favorite delicacy on the Cherry Patch Ranch's "menu".  He's lonesome since his too adventurous buddy, Rienzo, went and walked off alone into a desert state park outside Vegas, where he was possibly tricked into walking just a little further, a little further, by some shimmering mirage of summer's triple-digit wrath materializing on the sand.  Maybe if he'd carried water he'd have come back.  Days later, when Rienzo still has not returned or his body been discovered, despite the diligent efforts of local search-and-rescue teams, Michele, rather than mope around his hotel room or play blackjack in the attached megacasino, arrives at the Cherry Patch.  His Italian suit and accent make the ladies come alive as he enters.  "Pick me, pick me".   Instead, he drinks beer at the bar and Darla saunters over night after night, for a week.  All Michele does is drink, consummating his grief over Rienzo's loss through chit chat rather than a standard, burger-and-fries equivalent, "suck and fuck".

Manny, the brothel's gay manager and bartender, develops a secret but intense crush on Michele, and so lets him sit at the bar all night with Darla rather than insisting he get down to the dirty and proper business of his brothel, like he'd demand of any other patron wasting his precious time schmoozing instead of screwing.   "Army Amy" and her bulging biceps and colossal bosom could probably teach Michele and Darla a trick or two, no doubt envisions making bank with a lucrative mènage à trois, but Darla, wouldn't you know it (and my how Claire Vaye Watkins knows a narrative trick or two, turning her own as she plays some English-usage "pun and games" with the story's title and Michele's limited English usage comprehension) could be turning her most profitable trick ever on Michele, a cruel and platonic trick whose consequences may force Michele into making some forever-life-altering decisions he'd might not have made otherwise had he remained back at the casino awaiting news of Rienzo there.

Other shrewd tricks showcased in Battleborn are equally as nuanced and devastating.  Like the bored, romantic notions that spur two teenage girls into making an impromptu pilgrimage from their humdrum Minnesota town in "Rondine Al Nido" to that dream's oasis, Las Vegas.  To the decadent, megalopolis of the deluded and their delusions that, from an elevated distance miles away, appears like "a blanket made of lights, like light is liquid and the city is a great glistening lake."  A lake of fire.  Though in the naive eyes of "Our Girl" (could "Our Girl" be a disguised Claire Vaye Watkins?) and Lena, that lake of fire's nocturnal radiance is paradise awaiting, and not their impending perdition.  For little do our two heroines know that they are in fact about to pass through the gates of hell on earth once they open the doors to New York New York.  Can you blame them that they want to be a part of it, New York New York?  Still, it's hard not to cringe watching Our Girl and Lena go down a casino escalator, buzzed and struggling to hold their booze, when they make eyes at four cute guys -- and of course they're angelic imps -- going the other way, up up up.   Uh oh.  Don't go, Girls (I want to reach into the book and stop them), please don't go up like that in your skimpy skirts in awkward flirtatious pursuit (awkward because that's not really them), for these bad cads (don't you know? can't you see?), besides lecherous pigs, could be cons!  Or worse....

Our Girl and Lena soon regretfully realize that despite the iconic and brilliant marketing campaign to the contrary, what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas, but follows you home.

Claire Vaye Watkins is an endearing author at home in the literal and figurative desolation existing in deserts and in hearts.   She could just as easily have been the daughter of Edward Abbey as Tex Watkins, so attuned is her soulful bond to the eastern Mojave of California and Nevada, and to its hardy denizens surviving on the fringes.  When Watkins is on, she's fireworks.  A writer exuberant and exciting to read.  When she's off (which is rarer), she's still interesting, even if the stories -- the aforementioned "Wish You Were Here" and one I didn't mention, "The Archivist" -- ultimately fizzle.  Though maybe those stories will soar for other readers in ways they didn't for me.  Regardless, Claire Vaye Watkins is generally good and going to be genuinely great one day.  I can't wait for her first novel.

High Voltage (?) by AC/DC

LOW VOLTAGE  is more like it.  Not their most electrifying record.

Or: What do you get when you light T.N.T. but it doesn't explode?

Oh oh, I know!  High Voltage by AC/DC.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not a bad first album.  It's just incongruently titled according to its charge.

The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit by Sylvia Plath

The lighter, playful side of Sylvia Plath (turns out there was one!) emerges brilliantly in this delightful children's tale.  To hear Plath write for kids in a helpful, hopeful style and tone, completely devoid of the poetic, metaphoric despair she patented, is poignant, to say the least.  One wishes she could've heeded the moral lesson of her story, that it doesn't matter what you look like outside or especially in, more successfully.... But such difficult lessons rarely penetrate beyond childhood when one is plagued by terrible pain the suffocating weight of Plath's.  Try not to tear up if you read it to a kid, like I did.  If they ask why you wept, but they're too young to hear about her death, just rub your eyes, smile and reply, as I have -- "Aw ... it doesn't matter" -- and so pay your homage to Plath.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

A friend remarked in a thread here in Infinite Jesters regarding D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace (DFW), "It was so interesting and heartbreaking, I just felt terrible once I finished it."

To which I replied:  Exactly!  And that's why I haven't said very much about it.  Until now.  And even though it's obvious how the book is going to end, it's still sad when you finish it.  Made me feel a tad too empty for my taste.  I wish Max could've softened the blow somehow, but that's just wishful thinking.

I thought it was interesting how DT Max demonstrated how much of DFWs so called "non-fiction" was in fact confabulated.    I hadn't suspected the degree to which Wallace embellished.  Maybe not so much the meat of the truth about his life and experiences, but all the whimsical amplifications he made in the otherwise humdrum details concerning the people and events of his reportage.  His essay on the Illinois State Fair, "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is a good example of that.  Or how "the people at his church" that he sometimes mentioned in his essays were invariably stand-ins for his "12-step friends," exemplified in his piece in response to 9/11, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," collected in Consider the Lobster.  Based on that essay alone, I always assumed that DFW went to church.  I made inquiries, in fact, over the years, as a stalker/sleuth, attempting to uncover the secret of which church David Foster Wallace attended.  Come to find out, from Max's biography, he couldn't go to church, because whenever he did, he'd inevitably start chuckling uncontrollably in the pew.

And I wonder why, beyond obvious reasons of personal privacy and reputation concerns, when he so championed Authenticity and eschewed Irony in his later years, he never made public, beyond the occasional admissions in interviews that were play-downs of ginormous proportions, concerning his lifelong vulnerability to substances -- "yeah I experimented "a little" with drugs after I wrote The Broom..." blah blah blah -- the source or engine of his addictions.  His Depression.  Capital "D", as in Major, of which he was a chronic sufferer.  Might he still be alive, if its not too insensitive for me to conjecture (probably is, but I'm compelled, regardless, to ask the question), had he opened up about his struggles with depression, had he written another of his patented, footnoted essays on the subject, about how it crushed almost irreparably every aspect of his life, when he let it go untreated?

Yet he concealed it.  No one outside his family, agent, and maybe his editor at Little, Brown and tight circle from Amherst ever knew about it.  Is it any wonder then that he could so comprehensively fashion a complicated character like Hal, from Infinite Jest, who secreted his addictions so perfectly -- oh people at the Enfield Tennis Academy he attended knew he got high but not how often, just like people at Amherst knew DFW had had some personal problems at school that required he abruptly leave campus, but maybe didn't know the full gravity of just how life threatening those problems were -- and yet still functioned at genius levels in day-to-day academics?

Though I doubt Hal could hide any better than DFW could hide -- an overriding impression I'm left with reflecting on the biography.  That is, what was Wallace's perhaps unwitting ability to reveal himself by what he concealed.  Which strikes me as something DFW would've phrased as being "ironically ironic" about himself, especially for one who no longer wanted to be -- or in the least, no longer wished to be perceived as -- Ironic, whether in life or fiction.  Except DFW would've no doubt made the turn of phrase cleverly, and with an endearing and generous amount of hysterical self-deprecation my criticism lacks; and, in so doing, probably made himself seem that much more Authentic to us all, his fans and critics.  Man of many contradictions, DFW, and D.T. Max lets the contradictions speak for themselves.  His biography is as unflattering of Wallace as it is effusive in praise.  Yeah, Wallace, knowing full well he was pursuing a married woman, participated in the breakup of the poet and memoirist, Mary Karr's, marriage.  Karr denies they were involved while she was married, however, Max notes.  Bottom line:  DFW chased one too many skirts for his own good in his day, whether they were married or not, and did so even when at least one was worn by his student.  He was probably too smart for his own good too, able to rationalize and intellectually minimize some of the more dubious decisions he made regarding his multitude of failed romantic relationships.   Miracle he lived as long as he did, considering all that early drunken debauchery, all that later despair.

I didn't like how little Max spent on DFWs childhood, a single chapter, the book's first, and not nearly enough.  Perhaps the bio's brevity on the subject, as Anna noted in her comment in the Infinite Jester's thread, was at least partly due to his mother's intervention in D.T. Max's research.  Her desire for privacy.  Maybe so.  Small quibble though, compared to my next.

Larger criticism, and I'll disclose it originates from a recent review of the biography that I can't at the moment locate in order to properly cite, is, as its author argues convincingly, Max's strict overuse of a chronological order in encompassing the writing and life of one whose was as experimental, or as unorthodox in nature, as DFWs.  I agree with that.  Max nailed the facts of DFWs life but his connect-the-dots narrative missed an opportunity in paying homage to the more creative forms DFWs authorship consistently inhabited, be it in structuring his first novel after the intricate philosophy of Wittgenstein, or in the multilayered geometrics of Infinite Jest.  I'm not suggesting Max needed have constructed some kind of David Mitchellesque Chinese puzzle box out of his biography to satisfy the most insatiable Oulipo devotee, but couldn't he have structured his work just a tad less traditionally, considering the innately innovative core of his singular subject? The book was too predictable at times; tedious even.  As a hardcore fan I knew much of DFWs history already, and so knew what was probably coming next, like how I know the letter D comes next after C, and so on, but perhaps (and I hope) the more casual readers of DFW will still be surprised by what they find in Max's biography.  Predictable or not, it's a good solid biography, and I'll confess that despite my criticism, I certainly kept turning the pages, fully involved and invested with what I was reading, and finished the biography in two days.

Max made up for most of his predictability with his seamless onslaught of insightful analyses zeroing in on the connections between the content of all of DFWs fiction and nonfiction with that of his life.  The way Max thoroughly applied this connective-commentary upon the title story to DFWs first story collection, Girl With Curious Hair, in particular, was beyond exceptional.  In it, Max reveled in DFWs deadpan delivery he exacted in filleting the dispassionate novels of Bret Easton Ellis, which up to the time of Girl With Curious Hair's 1989 publication, would've included Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction.  DFW ridiculed Ellis' dry style and nihilistic content with such exquisite wit and verve (qualities Ellis' fiction lacks), that Ellis was even less than a pile of ashes by the time DFW was finished with him.  Hysterical.  It was like DFW had made Bret Easton Ellis "disappear here, Dude" in the very pages, the satiric prose, of "Girl With Curious Hair," and Max showed us, practically paragraph by paragraph, exactly how DFW went so Houdini on him.  Splendid work.  Superior explication.  No wonder Ellis lashed out a few months ago in an embarrassing spate of tweets about Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, shortly after its release.

Mindful of what beelzebubba shared in the thread I linked up at the top, about meeting D.T. Max at a Texas book fair, how when he acquired his autograph, Max conveyed to him that future bios will undoubtedly cover more of the personal, family stuff of DFWs, and maybe then we'll know more about that often-difficult relationship he had with his mother, whom he clearly modeled, according to his sister -- who recognized the resemblance immediately when she read an early draft of Infinite Jest -- in the cool, calculating, matriarchal character, Avril.  In fact, she let DFW know that she was worried (and shouldn't he also be worried) about their mother's reaction once she'd read (and witnessed, like looking into a mirror) the inspiration for Avril?  DFW hemmed and hawed about it, noncommittal in his response to his sister's concerns.  No surprise then, when soon thereafter, because of Avril, DFW and his mother did not speak to one another for five years following the publication of Infinite Jest.

I look forward to reading those future, perhaps more complex, biographies on DFW whenever they're eventually published.  Hopefully their structure and style will be more congruent with DFWs serpentine convolutions than D.T. Max's straight-laced chronology.  For those who enjoyed Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, as I did, and want more, I'd recommend Understanding David Foster Wallace by Marshall Boswell, a fine, albeit more academic study, focused primarily on Wallace's fiction rather than his personal life, published just over a decade before he died.