Under the Screaming Trees

[muckefuck]

mollpeartree's freshly posted reading processional 2012 is a reminder of how lax I've been in reporting on my own fiction reading. I decided to take a break from my Russians for the holidays and packed two books for St Louis: John O'Hara's Appointment at Samarra and Junot Díaz' The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I can no longer recall who suggested that I read the former, but it had been waiting patiently for me to read it ever since I picked it up nearly a year before. The Díaz was an impulse purchase the day before I left because I'd heard some good buzz and was intrigued by the premise.

I actually started the O'Hara shortly after I bought it, but when I hit the line "for it is Christmas morning" in the third sentence, I laid it aside. Reading a Christmas-themed story out of season is for me like having Christmas cookies at a barbecue. "Themed" is the wrong word, really, because the Yuletide setting is only really important for the clump of parties on the social calendar, through which we can trace the disintegration of the novel's chief protagonist.

The 1930 setting really underlies the truth of the adage of the past being a foreign country. I mean, I did recognise commonalities between the social order of small-town Depression-era Pennsylvania and that of places I've lived in the Midwest, but they weren't much more striking than, say, those between the mores of bourgeois Germany in the late 19th century as represented in Buddenbrooks and my own German-American family.

I was most struck by the frank depiction of sex and sexuality, mostly because I wouldn't have expected to find it in an American novel of that era, by this was apparently one of O'Hara's calling cards and source of great notoriety at the time. It was also amusing, in light of the current classic cocktails revival, to get a glimpse of real Jazz Age cocktail culture:

The drinks were rye and ginger ale, practically unanimously, except for a few highballs of applejack and White Rock or applejack and ginger ale or apple and ginger ale, or gin and ginger ale. Only a few of the inner sanctum members were drinking Scotch.

(White Rocks Beverages still exists, despite everything, but it's not clear from me which of the twenty varieties in their portfolio is intended.)

O'Hara himself called the plot "quite slight" and so it's mostly the finely-observed sociological details ("accuracy" being reportedly something of a fetish for the author) that mostly carried the novel for me. The writing is Hemingway-esque in its simplicity, which is particularly effective in scenes of psychological breakdown; it can sometimes seem at odds with the purpose of the more expository passages. It's a tremendous portrait of a marriage, which is probably why I thought going into it that this would be its overwhelming focus. Makes me curious to seek out some of his other work but far from burning with eagerness.

Díaz' book also combines a closely-observed portrait of a place with the biography of a self-destructive man but is different in almost every other way. That's not just because the place is the Dominican Republic but most of all because of the style, which is self-consciously slangy, "ethnic", and peppered with pop culture allusions. What drew me to it was its preoccupation with a double outsider, a gamer geek from a minority culture. The author frequently emphasises that however bad it is to be a virgin white boy who reads Tolkien and plays Gamma World, that's nothing compared to being from a macho Hispanic society and doing the same.

Again, I found it interesting more for the pseudo-sociology than the plot as such; it didn't really come alive for me until the extensive middle section retelling the experiences of the title character's mother growing up during the Trujillato. (And this despite the fact that at various points I mused on how desensitised I was to such fictional horrors after reading semi-autobiographical accounts of everything from Mao's China to Mengistu's Ethiopia.) There's a certain element of trying to hard in many of the more reference-heavy adolescent passages.

But it was enjoyable enough to finish in a few days, mainly in the course of the train trip down and then an hour before bedtime on nights when I wasn't ready to simply drop from exhaustion. As with O'Hara, I'm not filled with confidence that another story set in essentially the same milieu would interest me as much. I'd be kind of scandalised that it won the Pulitzer if I weren't beyond putting any stock in most American artistic awards at this point.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

The drinks were rye and ginger ale, practically unanimously, except for a few highballs of applejack and White Rock or applejack and ginger ale or apple and ginger ale, or gin and ginger ale. Only a few of the inner sanctum members were drinking Scotch.

(White Rocks Beverages still exists, despite everything, but it's not clear from me which of the twenty varieties in their portfolio is intended.)

Looks to me like it was the mineral water.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Great tag line!

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

There must be some awards which chime with my own ideas, but certainly there seems to be something about the Pulitzer criteria in particular which goes directly against what I think makes good writing, to the extent that I'm starting to see it more as a warning than a recommendation. In 2010 I conincidentally read three Pulitzer-winners in a row -- Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a history of the CIA by Pulitzer-winner Tim Weiner, and....I forget the third. But I hated them all, and more to the point I just thought the writing was so technically bad that it removed all my confidence in the judges' standards.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

For me, the last straw was the year that every single finalist was either from or living in the same area of Brooklyn. (It may not have been the first year this happened, actually, just the first year I noticed it.)