"The Cults of the Famous and the Dead"

Todd submitted this article in response to two recent novels about men out of place in the modern world. He fears the Internet and disavows new technologies; follow him on Twitter! To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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I finally got around to Audrey Niffenegger’s oft-recommended The Time Traveler’s Wife this week. By coincidence, this immediately followed the new Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed, making two-in-a-row post-White Noise novels about the effects of debilitating disease on otherwise loving and fruitful marriages. What I’m left with is that Ferris knows his pathos, while The Time Traveler’s Wife gets added to the list of wildly popular entertainments that make me feel like I’m living alone in a nation of people speaking a different language.

What do people see in The Time Traveler’s Wife? I’d love to know. Is it the sense of accomplishment at getting through a 500-plus-page book that spells everything out in the first 50? Is it the on-the-nose statement of themes? Niffenegger treats book-club hot topics such as “free will v. predestination” and “true love v. adversity” with all the nuance and subtlety of a slasher flick serial killer opening wounds with a large kitchen knife. “…sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know?” muses the 13-year-old Clare to the 36-year-old Henry, her future husband, early in the book. “Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.” Henry replies, “That’s called determinism. It haunts my dreams.” Much later, when adult Clare has taken up painting pictures of birds in cages, Henry wins the lottery for her. Hooey.

In Niffenegger’s unwillingness to toy with her “chrono-impairment” premise, she sets up an internal logic where the entire story is laid out in the first 50 pages of the book. She uses the rest of her ink telling you things you already know, throwing around dramatic miscarriages that are all the more unbearable for the knowledge that Henry and Clare will, in fact, have a beautiful, perfect, time-traveling daughter. This is a love story wrought with tension but devoid of mystery or possibility. The dual narrators’ extreme angst is borne of a happy and loving relationship that actually lasts quite a bit longer than most (from Clare’s age 6 to age 82, at least). I fail to see anything interesting in this, especially when stretched over 500 sensationalist pages.

Niffenegger, presumably paid by the word, fills entire chapters with thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical indulgences. Step-by-step descriptions of Clare making fancy paper in her art studio regularly perforate the already-flimsy forward momentum of her story. Niffenegger also gives Clare her own hometown (South Haven, MI) and adopted home city (Chicago) to serve as the two major settings. The book regularly reads like a series of Yelp reviews, detailing “Clare’s” favorite restaurants, museums and clubs in the Chicagoland area: “The waitress arrives, and we hurriedly consult our menus. I don’t want to bicker in Katsu, my favorite sushi restaurant, a place we eat at a lot. I reflect that Henry is counting on this, in addition to the intrinsic happiness of sushi, to placate me. We order goma-ae, hijiki, futomaki, kappamaki, and an impressive array of raw things on rice rectangles.” It’s one of the more graceless attempts that I’ve read by an author to shoehorn irrelevant agendas into a fiction— the book will even give you directions to some of these places, and their owners all get thanked in the acknowledgments.

But if you want an example of successfully integrating the setting into the mood and character of a piece, go to Ferris, who used Chicago pretty decently in his first-person-plural debut, Then We Came To The End, and sets most of The Unnamed in and around New York City. The hero here is Tim Farnsworth, an over-worked lawyer who doesn’t spend enough time with his family anyway but spends even less when afflicted with an unheard-of illness that drives him to set off on compulsory, involuntary walks. His legs have minds of their own, and his disease is weird, hilarious, pitiful and impossible to diagnose or cure.

The Unnamed takes the right note from White Noise, the paranoia-fueled college campus of which mirrors the suburban upper-middle class malaise of Tim and his wife and daughter. Pre-apocalypse looms throughout the book; nature itself seems to be whispering in Tim’s ear that though he may feel alone, he is not. The city of New York is Tim’s comfort zone and he is often stricken to leave it, on foot, to nowhere and for no purpose.

You take these two afflictions at face value and they are pretty much the same thing:  Tim and Henry are forced to cope with implausible, unbelievable diseases that threaten to destroy their marriages. The compulsory walking and the compulsory time travel relentlessly destroy everything from their physical bodies to their emotional well-being. But even as Henry’s chrono-impairment is unlikely to ever strike in our real world, Tim’s walking takes on a fantastical quality that actually anchors the story in its dying-world setting. The phrase for this is “internal logic,” in which Ferris could give Niffenegger a lesson or two. The Unnamed feels like a more inventive fiction than a story about time travel, and then manages to strike at our very real heartstrings in the exact same way The Time Traveler’s Wife fails to. The threat to Tim’s marriage, sanity and body is palpable, the dénouement heartbreaking. The Unnamed is a fable of our times, dealing in personal disconnection, technophobia and globalization with a deep empathy. The Time Traveler’s Wife is just cheese, and Swiss at that, full of holes and short on ham.

Eating the Dinosaur

Todd contributed this post on Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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According to the copy on the back of Chuck Klosterman's new collection of essays — copy he presumably wrote himself — the "larger theme" of Eating the Dinosaur is "something about reality… most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened."

Klosterman is a pop culture pundit. He makes his living writing about and discussing various aspects of our modern world that range from politics and the Internet to Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo and the television show Survivor. This is his sixth book, after two memoirs, an anthology of previously published journalistic essays and interviews, a novel and another collection of original essays. I've been following the guy for quite a while now and my opinion of him used to rise and fall by the extent to which I agreed with his opinions on a given film or band.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman has come into his own as a philosopher for the modern age. While he's previously been indispensible as a thinker and talking head in the consumption and analysis of popular culture, I think he has advanced now to a point where I would say his work is finally "Capital I" Important.

There is an overarching theme here, as stated, that was missing in his previous book of essays, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. From the quoted description, you'd think he might just be discussing cable news and the Internet. However, while those certainly come into play here, they are but two of several topics that get strung together in surprising and confounding theses that actually affect a deeper and more complicated engagement with the pervasive culture in which we all have no choice but to inhabit.

In "Oh, the Guilt," Klosterman draws a lengthy comparison between Kurt Cobain in his final days as a rock star and David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidian sect that was burned alive at Waco. Both men, he posits, were victims of an iconography that they only kind-of asked for and couldn't handle, emotionally. In the final section of the book, "FAIL," he issues a lengthy treatise on the prophetic nature of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto "Industrial Society and Its Future." Klosterman ties this into a feeling, reflected throughout the book, that in the Information Age we have lost control of our technologies and are now slaves running along a superhighway with a minimum speed limit far beyond our reach.

But it's not all as heavy-handed as that summary might imply. At his most serious, Klosterman drops references to pop music and reality television and keeps the tone light and digestable. He also never preaches. As I closed the book I was left with a definite sense of paranoia about the world I live in, but simultaneously my fears were assuaged by Klosterman's optimism and intellectual bonhomie.

At the same time, what makes the book so important is that any conclusions reached about society or popular culture will vary wildly from reader to reader. Klosterman isn't afraid to say "I don't know;" he's merely in the business of asking questions that need to be asked. It's easy to write an essay about the inherent stupidity of the sitcom laugh track; Klosterman asks us to consider the laugh track's relationship to an American's daily dosage of 'courtesy laughter,' and what it says about us as a people that the device perseveres, like a cockroach, to this day.

I generally try to promote discussion of those aspects of our popular culture that generally go ignored by the intellectuals. The high-brow must consider the low-brow, and vice-versa. Survivor may be a bread and circus show for middle Americans condescended by coastal liberals, but it's also a thrilling examination of rat-in-a-maze sociology. At the same time, left-wing hero Ralph Nader must be considered as the swing of the 2000 election that sent America down the rabbit hole. We must consider all sides; we are all, in fact, in this together. In the simple battle to keep a conversation going, Klosterman is my brother-in-arms. Fight the good fight, man.

The Boyfriend List

Todd, who is also known as my boyfriend, contributed this post on The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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A friend of mine (and contributor for The Misfits' Book Club) has been relentlessly throwing young adult fiction at me all year. Her most recent recommendation was the work of E. Lockhart, who's had her name on seven books in four years with an eighth due in 2010. Her 2005 debut was The Boyfriend List, which follows the exploits of high schooler Ruby Oliver as she suffers through a particularly heartbreaking sophomore year. This is the first in a series. If you told me last week I was going to get really into the four-book saga of a heartsick fifteen-year-old girl, I might've doubted you.

The book is structured against Ruby's list of the fifteen boys that have been, in one way or another, subject to her affections. Each gets his own chapter as Ruby dissects the relationships (or lack thereof) with her therapist. Sure, it sounds groan-worthy, but the novel, like any good work unfairly ghettoized onto that "young adult" shelf, quickly transcends its gimmickry thanks in part to expert plotting but mostly to Lockhart's uncanny ear for her young protagonist's voice.

Ruby is a dazzling creation. She makes coy use of footnotes and slang and has favorite words that she overuses. Ruby is the most lifelike narrator I've read in a while, flawed and selfish yet self-aware, in pursuit of self-improvement and validation. She's also profoundly sad and misunderstood, the victim of a social network that emphasizes labels and hierarchies and flourishes through texting and emailing but fails to promote any kind of real communication.

As with most high school-set stories of heartbreak, teenagers' inability to communicate honestly with each other is the thematic focus of The Boyfriend List. Ruby allows herself to be groped in a movie theater by a jock she barely knows (she discovers she kind of likes it); she responds to a sincere display of friendship by Boy #14 with a harmful and cruel "Fuck off." It's one in a string of devastating moments, leading me to desire throughout the story that I might sit Ruby down and impart some brotherly advice.

But the mistakes of adolescence are as easy to rue with perfect hindsight as they are to make, blindly, in the moment. The book is filled with astonishing set pieces that are far more exciting and suspenseful than I would've expected from a first-person coming-of-age story such as this. One breathless sequence revolves around the day the senior class is passing out roses and carnations ordered by friends, crushes, lovers and secret admirers among the underclassmen. Ruby waits all day in the hope that she will receive the right flowers, watching as friends count their stems like so much loose change. It unfolds like the final-act heist in a crime movie.

The Boyfriend List comes across as Mean Girls without the satirical sheen — the harsh truths imparted here with comic relief as opposed to the other way around — and it works just as well. In fact, there are several plot points which mirror that film. It leads up to a girls' room confrontation by two former best friends which poses Ruby on her knees, her lap soaking wet. As symbolism goes, it's pretty weighty for a YA book, which just goes to remind you that you can't ignore something just because you're not in the marketed-to demographic. I have a hundred other books to read, but the sequels to this are going to leap high in priority just as soon as I pay off my overdue fines at the Chicago Public Library.

Dead Until Dark

Emmyjean contributed this post on Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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"'I have taken some night classes in psychology,' said Bill Compton, vampire."

This should give you an idea of what we're facing in Dead Until Dark, the first entry in Charlene Harris' Southern Vampire Mystery series.  Exposition so clunky it had me barking with laughter in public.  The incongruous pairing of would-be courtly language with present-day buzzwords.  And of course, vampires. Fucking vampires. 

When our grandchildren look back on the early 21st century mass cultural orgasm over vampires and ask us what that was all about, I'll have no good answer for them.  Sure, one could spin together a nice tale about fascination with vampires dating back to tales of Vlad the Impaler, told 'round a crackling Carpathian peasant's fire.  Bram Stoker would surely get a entry, trying to justify the vampire fascination as being part of a powerful literary tradition about the seductive power of evil.  

And then when I got to the Southern Vampire Mysteries, I'd blame them all on George W. Bush. 

This book, ostensibly about the collision between two exotic worlds, is in fact a celebration of their mutual mediocrity. Bon Temps, Louisiana is stuffed with unloveable losers.  There's our heroine Sookie, a waitress with few aspirations beyond sunbathing and slinging beers at Merlotte's. Her brother Jason is beautiful but proudly dumber than the sacks of asphalt he spreads as a road crew worker. Pity poor Arlene, beer slinger and single mother incapable of learning from her (many) encounters with bad men that she is not, in fact, an actual doormat. Sookie's lug of a friend from high school is still holding onto old football rivalries. Her Gran's old lady friends salivating over shared memories of the "Glorious War."  Even the vampires themselves, supposedly dripping in glamor and mystery, spend their nights at a bar in a Louisiana strip mall. Denizens of Bon Temps, undead or otherwise, aspire to nothing greater than their next beer or roll in the hay and/or coffin, yet they wear their stupidity, provincialism and prejudices as badges of pride. It's easy to imagine Sarah Palin referring to them as "real Americans." At least Twilight eventually sent its heroes to Italy. 

Speaking of Twilight and its feminist critiques, Dead Until Dark at least has the decency to grant our heroine a life outside of her vampire paramour.  Sookie may claim to be all boobs and no brains, but she is also a telepath (a "gift" or "curse" depending on the requirements of the scene).  That we would praise our narrator having experiences or thoughts outside of those immediately related to her boyfriend seems ridiculous, but in a post-Twilight world this makes her uniquely self-possessed.  Of course, it is Sookie's odd inability to read Bill's thoughts that draws her to him.  Because the key to a relationship is stony silences and unanswered questions. 

It bears mentioning that True Blood, the HBO series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels, is everything the books want to be but fall short of. Cameras linger over titillating sex scenes that on the page cut away to a moonlit sky and wind in the trees; characters drawl with hilariously overdone Louisiana accents; the opening credits teem with images of Southern Gothic tropes like menacing Klan members and tent revivals. Where the Skinemax-inspired show prances about with tongue firmly in cheek, the amatuerish writing of its source material comes off as cut-rate fanfic. True Blood is lusty, campy, and in on the joke where Dead Until Dark remains, well, bloodless.