They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most.
According to Harold Bloom, the four major American novelists of the current era are Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. After recently reading and enjoying McCarthy for the first time I decided to move onto Roth’s latest. Interestingly, both authors were born in 1933 and, although The Road and Everyman are vastly different, I did find them exploring similar themes, or at least provoking me to consider certain, very big, subjects.
Philip Roth’s Everyman is about death, illness, regret and dying, but strangely it isn’t really a depressing read. The novel begins with an unnamed man’s funeral before backtracking over the events of his life. It’s intelligently written and moving, and Roth manages to delve into the complex life of an individual in such a comparitavely short book. The novel moves back and forth rapidly through time but there’s meaning in Roth’s meanderings. His subject’s memories tend to spark other memories, many of them being linked by periods spent in hospital, either as a small child with a hernia, or visiting others – dying parents and friends. Roth also conjours up a vivid image of a Jewish family and their New York jewellery shop in the 1940s, bringing the past alive, while at the same time delivering an elegy to a spent life.
Roth’s Everyman isn’t a particularly likeable character. I read him as arrogant, and I wamed to him less during the scene where, as an old man, he attempts and fails to pick up a young girl jogging in the park. There’s also sections of the book describing his particular sexual preferences that I’d much sooner have remained unaware of. He’s failed at marriage three times, two of his three children dislike him. He grows old, grows ill and faces death. Why should I feel sorry for him? As a reader it was entirely my choice; the dying man seeks redemption and he’s in the hands of the reader. His plight becomes compelling; I didn’t like him but I did care for him. And I forgave him.
There’s much to admire in Everyman because it is such a skilfully written novel. The closing pages were the most effective for me, where the man visits the family graveyard and strikes up a conversation, Hamlet – style, with the resident gravedigger. It’s poetic and elegant writing at its best, and where a lesser writer could fail dismally (sinking too far into Shakespearean pastiche) Roth handles it with real art.
Everyman is a concise and brilliantly written book by a writer who, although now in his mid seventies, is – and here comes the cliché – working at the height of his powers. It’s a meditation on life and its end that I would imagine -and hope – Ian McEwan will also be delivering twenty years from now. Until then, Everyman is one of the best ruminations on death that I’ve ever read, and features an admirable homage to Hamlet. And do I agree with Harold Bloom? Two of the best novels I’ve read this year are by McCarthy and Roth so, partly, yes, although this jury is still out on Pynchon…
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Don’t give up on The Road. It’s a bleak, depressing and harrowing book, but it’s still a remarkable work of fiction that deserves the praise it’s received so far, and deserves to be read to the end.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel is set in a post apocalyptic world where the human race is facing extinction. Cities are burnt and abandoned, a sooty ash covers the cold and dying landscape, food and resources are scarce. Amongst this devestation an unnamed man and his young son struggle on, following an endless road in a vague hope that they will find safety, life and the fabled “good guys”. They search and scavenge; for food, tools and shelter and the story falls into a repetitive rhythm as McCarthy describes their endless tasks – filling their cart of belongings, gathering wood for fires, seeking out new hiding places, looking always for useful things. One of the most effective parts of the book is when the man finds a rare object of beauty, an antique sextant from an abandoned ship. After admiring it he simply discards it, an object useless to him in a life only in need of useful things.
The Road isn’t a science fiction novel. We don’t find out what has happened to cause this catastrophe; it’s likely that there’s been a nuclear holocaust – but the conceit of this novel is that we must just accept what has happened. It isn’t a horror novel either, although it contains some of the most horrible scenes I’ve read for a long time. If I had to categorise this book I’d probably fail. It isn’t attempting prophecy; at the most it’s a warning of how easily humanity can slide into terrible depths, those of self-destruction, murder and cannibalism.
What makes this novel work is the father and son relationship. As a parent I found this convincing and very moving; I couldn’t stop whispering to myself “yes, yes, yes” as I read on. Their relationship is just spot on – the father’s protection of his son at all costs, the boy’s endless questioning and need for reassurance, his scepticism and how they deal with the ever present danger engulfing them. The Road asks uncomfortable questions of the reader. How far would you go to protect someone? Would you be prepared to kill or be killed? Because the bond between father and son was so believable I found myself able to consider such questions.
Unhappy reading at times, at others almost unbearable, but I was compelled to read on. I’m not giving away any spoilers here, but if you leave the book unfinished it will be a far bleaker experience for you than if you finish it. Don’t give up on The Road.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t left it long enough since finishing The Book Thief, but I found Everything Is Illuminating difficult reading. Difficult in it’s subject matter of the Holocaust rather that Jonathan Safran Foer’s experimental shifts in writing style; although at times I did find the book often trying too hard to impress. On the whole the novel is a great achievement. Foer wrote Everything Is Illuminated when he was in his early twenties, which is part of the reason I’ve put it off for so long. How can such a youngster write so deeply? Okay, how can he be so illuminating? Maybe I’m just prejudiced as an oldie.
Everything Is Illuminated is at times hilarious, such as the account of the journey that the Foer character, his interpreter, his interpreter’s grandfather and a flatulent dog called Sammy Davis Junior Junior embark upon. At other times it’s heartbreaking; the Holocaust flashbacks, and what eventually happens to the characters that we grow fond of. I loved it, but I was also infuriated by it. At times I hated it. I lapped it up and despaired of it it turn. I embraced its insight and then I didn’t understand it. I found it a breeze and then I found it unbearable. I couldn’t put it down and then I didn’t want to pick it up. Flaws in me rather than the book, perhaps. Who am I to say?
Everything Is Illuminated is one of those books I find I am unable to review, possibly because it demands rereading before fully understanding. I can only make a small suggestion. Form a book group. Recruit as many people as you can, all creeds, all ages. Read this book. I found that Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood was the same for me in that I couldn’t review it, and I am soon to start on McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, another possibly disturbing novel I’ve heard great things about.
Before that, however, I’m having a go at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ve guessed it. The novel is bleak and disturbing, but gripping nevertheless. And I’m reading Philip Roth’s Everyman after that. But whoever said things were going to be easy?
The Bleak Book Group. Apply here…
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
I first read Slaughterhouse Five when I was 15 and it instantly became my favourite novel (before being usurped a couple of years later by Catch-22). Having just read Vonnegut’s classic for the third time, however, it may just have overtaken Heller’s again in my estimation.
Slaughterhouse Five is one of those books that you expect everyone to have read, but I’ll try to avoid making that assumption and attempt a summary. It follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner of war who experiences and survives the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Billy also travels in time, thanks to the aliens who kidnap and display him as an animal in a zoo, and the novel jumps from one part of Billy’s life to another as he timehops, encompassing his war experiences, his marriage and later life, more war experiences, more civilian life and even his own death. Call it a jigsaw, a jazz piece, interactive, whatever you decide, but Slaughterhouse Five always remains fresh and original.
It’s really an extraordinary and poetic work that’s beyond review. Vonnegut has a masterful way with words, very similar to Heller’s, where he can blend the absurd with the tragic, ironic and unavoidable. He’s also wry and very humourous, often darky as he exposes the sheer hoplessness of human situations. Billy Pilgrim is also a very unusual main character for a book in that he’s fairly weak, dim and charmless; many of the characters he encounters in the novel take an instant dislike to him. But as Vonnegut reminds us:
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
Whenever I reread Slaughterhouse Five I enjoy the opening chapter more and more, where the Vonnegut character sits down to start writing and gives the introduction that provides some snippets of what is to come. It’s one of those books that improves with rereads partly because you do know what is going to happen. Like the fourth dimensional Tralfamadorians and their all-encompassing vision of past and future, and like Billy’s own toing and froing through time, you can view this novel as a whole with no timeline or real beginning, middle or end.
But don’t be put off by the time travel element of this novel if you’re not a science fiction fan. Of course, we only have Billy’s word for it that he’s travelled in time anyway (whover he tells about it naturally thinks he’s crazy and it is revealed that he is suffering from the trauma of a plane crash). The fantastic parts of the book somehow add more weight to the depiction of the awfully real events. The controversial bombing of Dresden wasn’t widely known about or discussed much when the novel was first published in 1969; Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim a prisoner of war in 1945, witnessed the devestation first hand. His real experiences are weaved into the fiction of the book magnificently, using repetition of phrases (such as ‘so it goes’) and repetition of the haunting incidents in Billy’s life (the execution of a soldier for the triviality of stealing a teapot).
Whatever Vonnegut might say, Slaughterhouse Five is full of characters I will never forget: the disturbingly dangerous soldiers Roland Weary and Paul Lazzaro; the crazy science fiction author Kilgore Trout; the executed soldier Edgar Derby and Montana Wildhack, Billy’s ‘mate’ on Tralfamadore. Best of all is Vonnegut himself as he lurks in the background, who adds a touch of horrible reality – the flamethrowers used to incinerate the dead; the destroyed Dresden resembling the barren surface of the moon. Like shooting the soldier with the teapot, Man does pointless and futile things. And he will continue to do them.
I love it, what more can I say? Go on, read it. Or reread it. You know you want to.
Sigmund Freud visited New York in 1909 for his only trip to the US. His experience forms the backdrop to The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, with Freud and Carl Jung joining a cast of both real and imaginary characters in this lengthy crime novel.
Although it might give that impression when first picked up, The Interpretation of Murder doesn’t cast Freud as a Sherlock Holmes character. Instead the sleuthing is left to two fictional characters, Dr Younger and Inspector Littlemore, the former a keen practitioner of psychoanalysis (and a fan of Shakespeare to boot), and the latter a conventional New York cop.
Murder and sexual perversion are at the heart of this novel. A girl is apparently murdered, with another left molested and disturbed. Younger and Littlemore to the rescue but … sorry … I can’t go on. Unfortunately The Interpretation of Murder is a real bore. Freud and Jung, by far the most interesting characters in the novel, remain mostly in the background as the increasingly convoluted plot takes hold. Rebenfeld may know his subject matter (he’s written a thesis on Freud) but he’s no novelist. This novel lacks pace, believability and any real sense of mystery. As a writer, I’d put Rubenfeld in the Dan Brown league. And that’s not a compliment.
The novel has been praised for the authentic depiction of Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th Century and in part I agree; the relentless building work as skyscrapers are rapidly erected, the social divides, the emergence of the automobile – by far the best part in the book is where the crazed villain of the piece hauls a distraught horse up in the air by a crane – but it isn’t substantial enough. And Rubenfeld let me down. Another interesting part of the novel is the description of the underwater construction of the foundations for New York’s bridges with workers risking their lives in the subterranean caissons. Alas the truth of this has to be stretched a little to serve the plot, which ruins the supposed ‘educational’ aspect of the book.
All in all, I was desperate to finish this novel and was glad when it was all over. Rather like Freud’s impression of America:
His face seemed much more deeply furrowed than it had been a week ago, his back slightly bent, his eyes a decade older. As I began to disembark, he called out my name….‘Let me be honest with you, my boy,’ he said, from under his umbrella, as the rain poured down. ‘This country of yours: I am suspicious of it. Be careful. It brings out the worst in people – crudeness, ambition, savegery. There is too much money. I see the prudery for which your country is famous, but it is brittle. It will shatter in the whirlwind of gratification being called forth. America, I fear, is a mistake. A gigantic mistake, to be sure, but still a mistake.’
Note to self: avoid bestsellers.
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