Oskar's Mom: Searching and Loss in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

Words Words Words

I'm not big on announcing "SPOILER ALERT!" but be that as it may, don't read this brief piece on Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel unless you're okay with knowing some things that happen in the end of the book.  Or, in other words: Spoiler Alert.

Oskar Schell never considers himself a detective in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  He's not looking for the solution to a mystery, and instead characterizes his travels around New York City as "my search," telling people he meets that he's merely "looking for a lock."  Of course, what we learn throughout the novel is that the search itself gives Oskar a means of carrying on a day-to-day life in the absence of his father.  It gives him a means of ordering and calming his otherwise inchoate body of symptoms (self-bruises, tics, obsessions about 9/11 and clothing and death, etc).  Oskar fears that the conclusion of his search ostensibly forecloses the possibility of proximity (ie: his extreme closeness) to his father.  Once Oskar finds the lock he worries aloud to his grandfather: "I found it and now I can't look for it [...] Looking for it let me stay close to him for a little while longer" (304).  Finding the lock could never have been as important as engaging in the process of endless searching.

"United 93" and OBL

 

There are a lot of reasons to think about Paul Greengrass's 2006 United 93--not least of which is the film's complicated portrayal of Islam.  Here's my best effort when it comes to relating the movie to last week's events.

Since Osama bin Laden’s death last week, a part of the national conversation has been dedicated to determining how “we” are supposed to feel.  It’s a dilemma.  What emotions are appropriate this kind of event?  Ambivalence?  Relief?  Joy?  Satisfaction?  Perhaps more interestingly, the question of how to feel has often been framed as an accusation.  That is, it’s seemed quite common to hear people asking: “What emotions are inappropriate for this kind of event?” in an effort to disavow certain sets of reactions. I wonder why accusations of emotional immaturity and wrongheaded patriotism have been heaped with such vehemence upon crowds of White House and Times Square “OBL” revelers.  And I want to suggest that the narrative function of United 93 is in part to give us fictional space to experience these emotions without having to avow them.

The 9/11 Commission Report as Memorial

The 9/11 Commission Report stands as the government’s official take on “what happened” almost ten years ago on that infamously beautiful day on the Eastern Seaboard.  Perhaps surprisingly, it also stands as one of the most engaging narratives about the history of Al Qaeda and America’s counter-terrorism efforts.  It’s really well written—a fact that surprised many critics when it was first published.

In light of last night’s events—a kind of strange kickoff of the nation’s Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 pensiveness—I have been thinking about other ways to think of the report.  Perhaps we can think of the report, less as a government document, or even as a work of literature.  It’s an instruction manual on what, why, and how we should respect the authority of the state.  In effect, the report acts as a kind of memorial to September 11.  Memorials establish the rules for what constitutes citizenship, and confirm our participation in a fantasy of national belonging.  When thought of as a memorial, it seems possible to suggest a broader importance for this government document.

Newspapers in "Falling Man"

Trying to combine the last two posts together a bit.  Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man thinks a lot about the relationship between the individual and the historical, but in a way that is much different from Junot Diaz and Jennifer Egan.  Here the concern is about the relationship between individuals and an exemplary/spectacular/singular event.  How does an individual's relationship to a historical event like 9/11 differ from that individual's relationship to the ongoing narrative of a continuous history?  I think the novel helps us address some of these questions, while at the same time providing some insight on how newspapers mediate the transition from post-trauma to ordinary life.  Or something.  I'm really tired.

Don DeLillo's Falling Man presents characters with different relationships to visual, literary, and performance art.  The novel meditates on the ability of different genres and forms of art to mediate trauma--to help characters work through the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.  Meanwhile, the novel itself attempts to work in different genres.  The staccato, stilted dialogue of the characters often seems more like terse poetry than realistic portrayals of conversations; and (as we discussed in class), the tightly stylized form of the book resembles a self-contained still life.  In other words, Falling Man engages with questions about the usefulness (uselessness) of artistic forms as means of smoothing the transition from trauma "back to" ordinary life.

Wondrous Goons

I've been swooning over Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad for a while now.  It's no longer my private recommendation--my "sleeper" candidate for best book of 2010 (and, to be fair, it was everyone else's sleeper candidate in that category well before it was mine.  That is, well before I got around to Goon Squad, the secret that the book was a secret success had very much gotten out).  By now, everyone knows it's a book that deserves to be torn apart, read multiple times in multiple directions: one whose parts can seem momentarily greater than the whole, but only momentarily.  And this is great news for a lot of reasons that involve a lot of things--particularly the opening up of the novel as a form, and the generation of dialogue about the future of fiction making.  But I wasn't so much thinking about the future as the past.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part II

Part II: Solipsism is Just a Kind of Self-Love

My ambitions at the start of the whole process of writing about Paul Kahan far outstripped my abilities as a journalist and reflect the naive belief that one can fake good intentions and yet write something that people actually want to read--something, that is (and maybe I'm assuming incorrectly about what readers want to read, but I'd like to think that I'm not too far off here), honest about the world that we inhabit that explores why and how we choose to inhabit it together.

Essentially, I was bored and broke--reading a lot of novels and living off of excess student loan money and the occasional sale of stock. I wanted to eat at fancy restaurants and pretend that I was a writer.

So I said I wanted to write something about Chicago and its relationship to food. I said I wanted to write something about the stagnation of twentysomething upward mobility in the midst of a recession. I said I wanted to write about politics. I said I wanted to write about happy hour crowds choking down organically fed pork and going nowhere very fast, but laughing very, very hard.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part I

Some background.

Grant Achatz, Chicago celebrity chef/darling/villain/prettyboy, will open two new restaurants in the West Loop very soon: Next and Aviary. Though he rose to fame with Alinea, now ranked among the greatest restaurants in the world, he is trying to woo a new following. Enter Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan. The pair essentially started the West Loop’s renaissance when they first opened Blackbird more than ten years ago. More than that, Kahan literally grew up here, working at a deli on Green Street. Achatz would be nowhere near West Fulton Market Street were it not for Kahan, Madia. And now he’s elbowing into what is very much their territory.

This piece began as an article about the restaurants that Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan opened.

Last year, well before I knew about Achatz, I wanted to find out why all of the restaurants in the Kahan-Madia empire—there are five, soon to be six, in all—are so popular. I pitched the story to a writer for The Atlantic, who said he liked the idea, but it never got published. Why it never got published will become apparent, I think, almost immediately. But the more I think about that night, and everything leading up to it, the more important it seems to become. So here, after rewrites and more rewrites and revisions, in roughly 1000-word installments (and with Achatz as an excuse), is the article in a radically different form than the one I first “submitted.”

One last thing. It’s no longer as much about food as it is about other things. Some things are reconstructions, imaginations, and outright lies. A writer's claims to veracity are always conditioned by his or her sense of how words relate to reality; by the substances they consume while "researching"; and by whom they're trying to impress. To varying degrees, my own sense of the relationship between language and the world is affected by all of these. The piece is nonfictional to the extent that it aims to capture a real mood, a sense, a bundle of affects that characterizes a particular moment in my life and the life of a friend. In this way, I have convinced myself that the writing is honest. And maybe only in this way.

Part I: Aftermath

I woke up on the hardwood floor in Tyler’s apartment, twisted into a crumpled pile of chewed up meat. There was blood everywhere. On my shirt, my pants. The tip of my thumb was sliced somewhat less than totally open, and had turned an alarming shade of purple. There was a crust of stale sweat coating my body. It felt as though the alcohol had sucked all the fluids out of my skin, and now I lay as dried out as an iguana. Pieces of malignantly flaking skin hung off my lips. I ran my shriveled tongue against the raw roof of my mouth and felt something scrape off. I swallowed and coughed, as the day began to insist upon consciousness, sputtering like a dying fish on the deck of a listing ship.

Best Books for Valentine's Day

I love Valentine's Day. I really do. It's some sort of weird disorder, or maybe just a testament to the successful rhetoric of greeting card companies. But in any case, it's nice to think that once a year you can either do something self-consciously hokey (or, you know, break out the ol' love swing) with your significant other, or cry yourself to sleep watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and listening to Coldplay.

Regardless of the state of your heart this February 14, here are some books to read to make sure that your brain is working:

Got a little someone special in your life? Try Lolita. It's not exactly the most un-horrifying experience in the history of modern literature, but it sure makes you feel normal by comparison.

Nobokov's unbelievably sinister portrayal of Humbert Humbert takes us through the psychology of a pedophile and leaves us wondering, well, how he thought up all of this stuff. The salacious content of the novel is one thing...and there are arguments on both sides about whether it is pornographic. I come down on the side that says: this is a novel that pushes the limits of narrator-reliability. Its unrelenting portrayal of psychosis is absolutely unique.

Dispatches from DC: The Problematic Ambitions of "Donald"

I like McSweeney's when it's funny. And though I have gone back and forth on Dave Eggers, I have been strongly in the "pro" camp (at least when it comes to his work) since Zeitoun, a powerful piece of writing about Katrina that may very well go down as one of the best books about that disaster.

But last night's reading of the McSweeney's-backed Donald at 826 DC was not funny. The evening presented a confusing and often painful caricature of what Eggers’s enterprise morphs into when it boosts authors who "do" politics. The concept and execution of Donald come off as shrill, opportunistic, and incurious. All the while, its authors trumpeted the incoherent idea of "serious fiction"--a term that McSweeney's did not invent, but one that it seems all too ready to mobilize as its reason for existence. Donald, written by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott, attempts to turn the tables on Donald Rumsfeld. Set to hit shelves on the same day as Rummy's memoir, the book is described as an "allegory," in which a Rumsfeld-inspired character is kidnapped, rendered, and tortured at the hands of an unnamed regime. Simply: Donald is the wrong book at the wrong time with the wrong message, and it took me less than an hour to decide that McSweeney’s owes its fan much more than this.

What Does "Persepolis" Help us Understand About #Jan25?

In a moment when the world's eyes are fixed on Egypt, what does a book about Iran have to teach us about politics, media, and representation of revolution?

Marjane Satrapi's celebrated graphic memoir Persepolis tells the story of the author's childhood and early-adulthood in Iran during the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. News outlets have been comparing the historic protests across Egypt to the period between 1978 and 1980 when the Shah was overthrown. The conversation in news media outlets this week has often centered on whether the Obama Administration is making the same mistakes dealing with Egypt that Carter made during the Iranian crisis.

Yet Satrapi's book does not exactly provide us with a clear perspective on how to view America's role in the political and cultural turmoil in Iran. The book portrays historical events, but that's not why it is essential reading. I don't even know if it's helpful to compare the Egyptian protests to Iran (and Persepolis did help me get a basic understanding of some of the crucial differences between Arab and Persian contexts). Rather, Satrapi interweaves the personal with the political, giving us a picture of how ordinary life adapts to and works through moments of national and cultural trauma. Moreover, it conveys this narrative in what is probably the most appropriate form to the task of portraying revolution: graphic narrative.

Brainwashed: "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and Anonymity as a Commodity

Nominated for an Academy Award in the category of "Best Documentary," Exit through the Gift Shop purports to tell the story of Banksy, the well-known British King of Street Art. We're told right from the start that this is "A Banksy Film," but over the course of the film's manic ninety minutes, it evolves into a biopic of Thierry Guetta. Guetta's fortuitous relationship with Space Invader--an early Street Art celebrity--and his relentless obsession with capturing constant footage of his everyday life make him a kind of videographic mascot for an ever-larger group of artists. Guetta gains the trust of a circle of international Street Artists, and from the income generated by what appears to be a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles, is able to follow them around and document everything. After a series of good luck, Guetta (so we are led to believe) develops a friendship with Banksy himself...and the film shifts.

Wells Tower Says Some Things

A few months back, I got a chance to exchange emails with Wells Tower. Below, find answers to some of my questions in full. Author of the collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and recipient of a 2010-2011 New York Public Library Fellowship, Tower is currently working on his first novel. Here he talks about the supposed "death of the novel," the "rise of the short story," ordinary life...and Pliny the Younger. His collection was among the best reviewed (it got the unheard-of honor of being TWICE reviewed in the New York Times). You can listen to him read the hilarious and violent and beautiful Viking title story here, and read one of the best travel essays (about visiting Iceland with his father here). But first, here's the interview:


1) Writers from Philip Roth to James Wood have been warning us about the "death of the novel" for almost fifty years. What kind of credence, if any, do you give to these kinds of claims (that the novel is obsolete, dehumanized, hysterical, and incapable of "keeping up")?

We hear the same thing about literature generally, and I don't buy it. Prophesies of the novel's death are a kindred vanity to the Evangelicals' claim that the Rapture, any day now, is upon us. It's fun to feel like the last of something. And, sure, video games outsell literary novels by a dispiriting proportion, but unless we somehow cease to use language to make sense of the world, I am sure that people will continue to write novels that matter. (Way more after the jump...)

Remembering the "Other" Black Writers

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While trying to wrap one's head around the mindbending legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, it is important to remember black writers and artists who fit outside the dominant and often patronizing paradigms of black cultural production inculcated during things like "Black History Month." Growing up, I was taught to believe in a single cohesive narrative that explains how the leaders of black culture (to use an already fraught term) contributed to bringing the end of institutionalized racism in America. When reading Their Eyes were Watching God, Native Son, Invisible Man, and Go Tell it on the Mountain, the narrative was often oversimplified: black writers wrote books that overtly protested segregationist practices, and did so in a single unified voice. The truth is, of course, much richer and more complicated, but also more difficult to teach.

Hedi Kaddour's "The Bus Driver" and Ordinary Life

The Bus Driver: Hedi Kaddour

What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l'Opera
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passersby
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods toward a woman's dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him,
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat, This work is hard
And people aren't kind.

-- from A Walk in the City, Treason (YUP 2010), translated by Marilyn Hacker

Like 35 Shots, Hedi Kaddour's amazing collection Treason explores the lives of characters confronting breakdowns in the flows and rhythms of their routines. I don't want to sound like a broken record citing recent French art for doing this kind of thing so well, but I thought this poem could be fun to think of next to Denis's film , especially because Lionel drives trains and the bus driver in Kaddour's poem...well....you get it (apparently there's just something super ordinary about working in public transportation in Paris).

Some notes on "The Bell Jar," Richard Powers, and Evolving Definitions of Mental Life

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="286" caption="Yes I accidentally bought an edition meant for "young readers." I'm owning it."][/caption]

In an effort to make up for more than a few literary and personal-life-ish oversights, I finally read The Bell Jar this week.  From there, I turned back to some of the more famous poems in Ariel, making what I think is a common bonehead mistake when reading Plath.  It becomes incredibly difficult when reading Path's work not to consider biography as overdetermining every detail in her fiction and poetry.  Maybe it's partially her fault, sure.  The Bell Jar is so close to autobiographical that Plath famously prevented its publication in the United States and insisted upon releasing it under a pseudonym in Great Britain.  But I do want to try to put all of that aside.  To say that Plath's story is tragic (and even to suggest, as a friend put it, that Ted Hughs pulled of the most dastardly murder in the history of modern letters) does miss the point of this novel: namely, that Esther Greenwood is probably one of of the most distinctive characters in mid-20th Century American fiction.  I don't have the ability or background to articulate what the novel meant for the feminist movement, although Esther's observations about men and relationships are scathing and often hilarious.