Too, It Happened in Boston? contains a tender depiction of male camaraderie, among the narrator and Littleboy and a third, more ordinary and more successful painter, Leo Faber. The sweetness of the triumvirate’s friendship remains unpoisoned by professional jealousy—or by the naïve and increasingly dangerous fantasizing of the narrator. This in turn renders the swirl of corrupt commerce around them even more stark, and makes the disasters of chapters 54 and 89 genuinely tragic. It would be criminal not to also mention the joke- and riddle-loving ghetto urchin, Randolph, who serves as a kind of earthly sprite or spirit-guide at the entrance to the novel’s chamber of horrors and wonders. Late in the book the narrator muses, “Is there more to the child than meets the eye? His precocity is almost weird,” and the purity and innocence of the remark, given the weirdness and precocity of the narrator himself, is heartbreaking and hilarious proof of the narrator’s good faith with his companions, and Greenan’s with his creations. The narrator loves Randolph, and Faber, and Littleboy, and we love them and the narrator too, and we wish to preserve them all from disenchantment, from the rapacity of a modern world which discounts their reveries and shortsells their masterpieces as forgeries.
Cheapened by his descent into that world of forgeries, the narrator of Boston? then further dilutes his own angelic purity by shifting his efforts from the glorious white magic of the making of beautiful objects, and of his dreamlike voyages to distant times, to the paltry, venal black magic of arcane spells and ancient curses. Most bitterly, those prove more effective than art can ever be. The book’s unnamed angel is Lucifer, and like that angel, everything in the book is fallen: art and art patronage and love and late 1960s inner-city Boston are all fallen from grace by the end, and redeemable only by the faith required to assent to the book’s last few paragraphs. However deep into reverie you are able to follow Boston’s pathetic and splendid narrator—I reach a different conclusion each time I read the book—I guarantee you will not be sorry to follow him to the juncture where you must part ways. What a pleasure it is to introduce to you, reader, this little masterpiece on the subject of the world’s neglect of masterpieces! I feel almost as though I had single-handedly pulled Benjamin Littleboy’s “Birth of Death” from the flames of destruction, painstakingly restored the damaged portions, and then hung the canvas where it so clearly belongs: in the lobby of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
—Introduction to It Happened in Boston?, 2014
V
Ecstatic Depictions of Consciousness
Consumed
I seem to be in the middle of a minor “Cronenberg moment” this summer. I pinned my thumb in a car door, so tightly that I had to click the door open again to get it out. Days later the pain had faded, but the nail had turned black. After a few weeks’ growth, a feeble dividing edge of torn nail crept from my cuticle, as the dead nail begins its crawl out, to be replaced by—what? A new nail, I hope. (Stay tuned).
What makes this experience Cronenbergian, however, isn’t simply the grossness. It’s the obsession. Each morning I check the advancing nail as if self-Googling, or hitting “refresh” on a website. Whether Nail.2 is eventually a disappointment (“One of five stars: derivative of the earlier nail, not worth the wait”), I’ll nevertheless have been as enraptured as repulsed by the little allegory of death-and-regeneration my body is enacting—specifically by the mechanistic distance this slight mutilation has inserted between my sense of self and a new orientation towards my thumb as a foreign object, as a suffering machine stuck to my hand.
Our present is full of entrancing but rapidly-decaying media prosthetics: your new iPhone is hot, sure, but that’s partly because it’s also dying. In some 20 feature films, Cronenberg’s specialty has been a meticulous probing of the juncture where the resemblance between illness and sexuality becomes a metaphor for our relationship to our technologies—including the arts. Though we’re usually drawn to one and repelled by the other, sex and disease both amplify awareness of the mechanistic nature of our bodies, the obliviousness of their imperatives to our delicate selfhoods. That we work this out through our proxy devices—films and novels included—is helpless.
Now, if my black thumbnail wasn’t your cup of meat, you’ll likely wish to spare yourself even the rest of this review. On the other hand, if you found yourself leaning forward, I’ve got a book for you, and don’t say you weren’t warned. Nathan and Naomi, in Cronenberg’s first novel, Consumed, are a very contemporary couple. They’re media junkies who peddle the junk themselves, making a living as internet journalists feeding their own and others’ rabid appetites for sexual scandals or true-crime confessions presented in intimate and lurid detail. Their frantic pursuits are framed by intellectual references to thinkers including Foucault, Beckett, and Sartre, and mediated through the very freshest electronic sensors, camera lenses and computer apps.
Nevertheless, and as one would expect, such investigations plunge them into timeless and primal matters of sex, death, and mortal illness. Specifically, the book presents a locked-room mystery of sorts: Can it be possible that a woman said to be dying of cancer, and whose philosopher-cannibal-husband was seen devouring parts of her body on a YouTube video, is still alive? Or was she a consensual accomplice to her own murder? This core plot is elaborated in a highly traditional (and satisfying) way: twin investigations, apparently unrelated, which gradually entwine. Amateur detectives who become complicit—and, of course, involved sexually—with their suspects. As in a majority of his films, Cronenberg’s approach to narrative is sturdy and direct, the opposite of avant-garde. His originality is in what he’s driven to show you, the fierce sculptural intensity of his details and his willingness to linger. The tableaus in Consumed attain the same level. Taking just one for-instance, a 3-D printer constructs a model of a penis disastrously warped into the shape of a boomerang by Peyronie’s Syndrome (which exists; as many of Cronenberg’s ailments are real as conjured).
Whether to your taste or not, it really shouldn’t be shocking. In fact, such particulars are most likely routinely matched, or surpassed, in the work of thriller and horror writers in the post-Thomas Harris era, when monsters must trump Hannibal Lecter or else go home. What’s vertiginous in Cronenberg’s book is that such matters are presented in the absence of a reliably bourgeois moral framework. Instead, Cronenberg details them with a clinical curiosity. Try this:
When a slim-hipped naked young man entered the frame, Naomi immediately knew it was Hervé, even before he walked around the side of the table to place his hooked penis in Célestine’s coolly accommodating mouth. He brought with him something metallic that looked like a ray gun from a 1950s sci-fi movie, pale-blue and silver and trailing a black cable behind it…The naked young woman who entered from frame right, however, she did not immediately recognize, even after the woman had knelt at the head of the table in order to kiss and lick Célestine’s mastectomy scar…
Or this:
Nathan zoomed into the photo in front of them. That was ecstasy on her face as she cut herself, not self-pity, not masochistic pleasure…Nathan was shaping the article as he reacted. He would have liked to record these thoughts, just say them to GarageBand so that he wouldn’t forget them, but he was not yet comfortable enough with Roiphe to collaborate in that intimate way, to leave himself vulnerable to the old man’s sarcasm and irony.
These passages are typical of the book’s descriptive exactitude and flatness; its use of banal signifiers like “GarageBand,” and the constant germane citations of psychoanalytic or philosophical brands. The book seems to desublimate itself for you: No sooner does the reader think “This is like the case of Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife” than some character makes the comparison for you. The result is provocatively comic, and surreal in the manner of a Max Ernst collage. As Zadie Smith recently wrote, commenting on J.G. Ballard’s Crash (a book adapted by Cronenberg to film, and an unmistakable influence on Consumed): “Some of the deadening narrative traits of pornography can be found…b
ut surely this flatness is deliberate; it is with the banality of our psychopathology that Ballard is concerned.”
Such a tone prevails except when illuminated by the characters’ own reactions, and Nathan and Naomi are haphazard guides in this Bosch landscape. Their attitudes are distracted, craven, naïve, and occasionally rapturous. They’re rarely caught judging themselves or anyone else. A flash drive full of crime-scene evidence and a newly acquired venereal disease are equally examined for use-value: Could this new thing win me followers on Twitter? Is there a chance it might turn me on, or make my lover helpfully jealous?
In this, Nathan and Naomi are worldly, media-savvy innocents, and innocents are always waiting to be schooled. In the later chapters, and quite unexpectedly, Consumed gives way to a monologue confession by Aristide Arosteguy, the aging philosopher-cannibal-suspect of Naomi’s investigation. His testimony becomes, among other things, a tender paean to romantic love, to its persistence, its adaptability, its necessity in the face of death. Of course, Cronenberg being Cronenberg, this also necessitates a tender paean to another subject: elder sex (its persistence, its adaptability, etc.), especially elder sex of a non-vanilla sort. This may be, for readers the ages of Naomi and Nathan, a taboo more unsettling than cannibalism. Certainly it goes on in far more of your neighbors’ homes. After all, it isn’t only the young and tech-fetishizing among us who are fated for cyborg interfaces. Ever considered the perverse erotic potential of hearing aids? Consumed has.
—The New York Times, 2014
Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone’s second novel, after announcing himself (and winning the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award) with the Algren-esque bad-trip picaresque of A Hall of Mirrors, was a ruthless diagnosis of the Vietnamization of the homeland. The book works as a bait-and-switch: set first in Vietnam, Dog Soldiers reverts to Berkeley, Los Angeles, and SoCal Desert milieu that inevitably recalls Charles Manson’s, yet never for an instant do the characters succeed in leaving the war behind. Browsing amid porn theaters, “Hippie” cops à la Serpico, tabloid newspapers (“Housewife Impaled By Skydiving Rapist”), drug culture, and—most presciently for the U.S.A. we know today—prison culture, the book surveys both Joan Didion’s and Tim O’Brien’s nightmares and concludes that The Two Are One.
Yet for all that it is topical to Vietnam and the counterculture, to that moment when the early ’70s became the receptacle for all that had curdled out of the ’60s, Dog Soldiers is also a mercilessly doomy, and timeless, crime novel. Particularly as it concerns Danskin, one of American fiction’s greatest psychopaths, Dog Soldiers comes as near as The National Book Award’s ever gotten to the domain of someone like Jim Thomson or Charles Willeford.
And then there is the sheer fried density of the language, where clots of military and druggie jargon and early-’70s pseudo-philosophy ooze through Stone’s tight, clean, driven voice, which derives, it seems to me, from Hemingway, from the Faulkner of “The Bear,” and from Graham Greene, and which ought to speak to any fan of Don DeLillo or Denis Johnson. Stone’s certainly as much a master as Greene of the intentional Pathetic Fallacy, in which the natural environment or world of inanimate objects is made to throb with the psychological matter of the humans moving through it. Check this out:
In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.
One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.
Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.
A great American masterpiece.
—The National Book Foundation website, 2009
Bizarro World
What more do we want from Will Self? To make the obvious pun, are we after more Will, or more Self? In Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys, his third collection of short fiction to be published in less than a decade—or fourth, depending on how you count the paired novellas of his American debut, Cock And Bull—Self provides more, much more, of his vibrantly caustic prose and his anarchical and florid satiric premises. If Self isn’t funnier than he’s been before, it’s only because it would be impossible. He is flaunting his distinctive gifts again, with riotous, if inconsistent, results. And again Self hasn’t much bothered to deepen his engagement with character—that customary virtue of serious fiction—or temper his outrage with a smidgen of empathy.
It’s fair to suppose that Self has become the writer he means to be—a truly odd one, frozen in a rich collision with his culture, his influences, perhaps even himself. Blurbists have compared him to both William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, which certainly captures his aggression as well as his suburban surrealism. His erudite, onomatopoetic prose is often compared to Martin Amis’s. Yet none of these comparisons quite encompass the stubborn strangeness of Self. No, strip away his generically British body-disgust and anti-P.C. rants, and the contemporary writer Self most resembles is Nicholson Baker—the Baker of the outlandish fiction, not the tasteful essays. Both writers couple a fractal intensity of attention to the texture of the everyday with a fierce commitment to bizarre conceits that render everyday reality plastic and silly. Sometimes he achieves this in a single passage, as in “Flytopia,” where he fantasizes fly-killing expanded into a Hemingwayesque blood sport involving miniature needle-guns:
The quarry has broken from behind its cover of lint and fluff. It’s in the air! And the guns lead the flies, their muzzles moving sharply up, down, obliquely, tracking the erratic paths. A slight pressure on the trigger and the needle flies fast and true, skewering the droning bluebottle precisely through one wing and its bulbous abdomen. Crunch! It falls to the twistpile, bounces, settles down into death, like a slo-mo film of a wildebeest dropping on the veldt.
At best, Self’s struggle with these opposed gifts conjures up fiction that alternately boggles, amuses, and horrifies with strobe-like rapidity. At worst it offers punchlines laboriously stretched on a rack of realist detail. Tough, Tough Toys has plenty of both.
But what about the disgust, contempt, and alienation that pervades Self’s fiction? In his world humans of all classes, professions and races are little more than walking compendiums of the most garishly-unappealing physical and mental characteristics, their emotional responses manifested largely in bodily fluids, their ordinary strivings ludicrous, sad and corrupt. These premises are too heartfelt in Self’s work to seem received, yet they’re so uniform and, finally, unenlightening that they recede into backdrop. In the foreground is Self’s maniacal engagement with his own terrifying imagination. This, rather than his “darkness,” is the generator of the real energy in Self’s work.
The book opens with “The Rock of Crack As Big as the Ritz,” a perfect example of a tale overwhelmed by its premise. Self labors to produce a story under the shadow of this outrageous title, offering a gritty tale of black Londoners intoxicated by money and drugs; it’s never much beyond a showcase for his prodigious descriptive powers. “A Story for Europe” also suffers from conceptual overload. It’s about a British toddler who speaks his first words in what Self calls “business German,” and grinds interminably toward its payoff.
“Flytopia,” on the other hand, is a gemlike biological horror story, resembling a desublimated version of Patricia Highsmith’s story “The Snail-Watcher.” Self never flinches from connecting the dots be
tween repulsion and desire, and he’s likely to put the squeamish reader off sex until they’ve shaken the memory of his special effects.
“Caring, Sharing” is even better: Self unveils an alternate reality where oversized personal golems of pure comfort, called “emotos,” have taken the place of sexual partners, eradicating the dangerous highs and lows of real encounters. This deadpan allegory is not startlingly new—science fiction satire experts like Frederik Pohl and Robert Sheckley were delivering similar stuff in the 1950s—but it’s performed with tremendous gusto and a peculiar sweetness.
In “The Nonce Prize,” the short novella that closes the book, Self revives a black drug dealer featured in “Rock of Crack” for an elaborate and strangely tender tale of a prison short-story-writing contest. Danny, a criminal and addict with a gentle disposition, is framed for a horrific pedophilic murder. In prison Danny is introduced to literature—“Reading burst through his mental partitions, partitions that the crack had effectively shored up, imprisoning his sentience, his rational capacity, behind psychotically patterned drapes”—and is offered the chance to distinguish himself from the sex-offender population by winning a literary competition. As in his novel Great Apes, Self reserves his sympathy for the characters he’s written into the grimmest and most hopeless corners. Danny’s plight, as well as his unexpected spark of literary ambition, provides a merciful hint of human possibility that’s missing from the other stories—not that Self forgets to also provide calamitous humor, acidic lit-crit satire and the sound of iron gates clanking shut at the end.
More Alive and Less Lonely Page 12