Eschewing TV, month five, part two

Blindness, Paul Theroux
You know, I read (and believe I reviewed, and am too lazy to check) Dark Star Safari not too long ago, and liked it well enough, especially post-India, and had some interesting conversations with K about the whole nefarious aspect of aid organizations, which, honestly, I hadn't thought much about before. And then there was the line of thought it provoked about how the move to cities, spurred and even necessitated by globalization, is proving inadvertently disastrous for some cultures, in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel. But the most alarming thought was: Theroux is really losing it.

In revisiting, after several decades, the land that brought him an inexhaustible supply of stories about sleeping with African prostitutes, the poor man was evidently so desperate to establish that his virility remains undiminished, he had to announce a lustful thought every other page. The overall effect is to produce in the reader a kind of wincing "ever heard of 'doth protest too much'?"

In Blindness, he tries to tackle the subject head-on. I think. Even though it operates from firmly within the smack-you-upside-the-head school of symbolism, it's often difficult to know exactly what the book is trying to say, as both the symbols and the themes to be encoded are so huge ("Creativity." "Aging." "Genius.") that the whole enterprise runs perilously close to self-satire. And that's before you factor in the copious sex, which, I think, is meant to be boundary-pushing, but which mostly makes the reader feel alternately charmed and rather icky over what a man in his sixties considers to be kinky. Theroux, whom I used to adore, and who is pretty much responsible for misdirecting me into my career, is continuing to publish after his career is over. It's sad to watch a giant implode; it's like watching a supernova, and the escaping flares are his big themes, distilled. Those of us watching here on Earth through telescopes just get a glimpse of "Crossdressing sex!" as it flits by, or "Exotic travel!", trailing bits of its instantiation in previous books. But it's less a story than a sensory experience, and not a pleasant one.

HP 7, JK Rowling
Articles are reporting that people are asking "did you find it satisfying?" rather than "did you like it?" It's a book that had to perform work, and that carried over into the reading: bits of banter felt as though they were doled out as rewards for making it through chunks of exposition. But I think I'd soured on the enterprise before then. HP5, too, felt as though it had to perform the task of transition, and it turned me off in a way that never really switched back on. Plus I wasn't satisfied with the whole explanation of the big showdown, and what was up with that Austen-esque coda, with its delineation of future pedigrees? Surely, Rowling can't think that that's what people find most interesting about her characters.

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
A couple pages in, my precious-meters were sounding full-throated klaxons. But I ignored them, and I'm glad I did -- ignore the thinly-sketched characters and the plot here (which I couldn't recount to K, even while urging him to read it, without feeling apologetic, and he rightfully burst out laughing). I mean, Through the Looking Glass had no real characters or plot either, right? Stick around for the descriptions -- the glorious, wordplay-laden, the-author-is-obviously-having-a-blast descriptions. I wanna see this as an animated movie, and I want Tim Burton to do it. Quick, fun, and recommended.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
I picked this up at the library because I'm number 71 on the waitlist to take out The Yiddish Policemen's Union. And I feel torn: on the one hand, the writing is fantastic. The sort of fantastic that makes me want to own the book and pick it up and refer to it now and then to remind myself of how great writing goes. It gets out of the way of the story, but doesn't disappear completely; it confidently and effectively nudges the tale into that thin median between comedy and tragedy; it creates tension and suspense over which way it's all going to eventually fall, making the reader want to gulp the book down in big cool draughts.

And yet...

It's a boys' book. But, of course, it isn't fair to judge Chabon by different standards than I use for Philip Roth, and I do read Roth, and occasionally even confess to liking him. In some ways, Chabon grated more than Roth, because he dropped an odd hint here or there that he ought to know better (whereas with Roth, it would be like disciplining one of the cats for chewing up an important paper; it's just not fair to have those kinds of expectations). In tAAoKaC, for example, all the characters tragically waste about a dozen years. We're made to feel, really feel, the loss and squandering of talent of the two men, while the sole female character gets a curt acknowledgment of the meaninglessness of the life that circumstances have handed her -- but there's a little hat trick towards the end, in which her lover returns and suddenly everything's ok. Never mind that her creative and professional goals remain unfulfilled, with no apparent way to revive them. Or that the male characters get their professional lives back. I mean, after all, she's got a kid, and that should be enough for any woman, right?