Trimming the Canon

A group of contributors at The Second Pass have compiled a list of ten books that should be stricken from the canon. As it says in the introduction, this ‘is a list of ten books that will be pressed into your hands by ardent fans. Resist these people. Life may not be too short (I’m only in my mid-30s, and already pretty bored), but it’s not endless.’

Among the list are several books I have read, and I have to agree that some of these choices seem justifiable to me. For example, I really did enjoy Don DeLillo’s White Noise when I read it about ten years ago, but it read as dated even then. Sure it’s prescient, but when what it was prescient about is itself old news, perhaps it isn’t a crime to skip this.

Also must concur with the elimination of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I only read this novel because a friend of mine told me it was the best novel he had read that year (2006, I believe). As The Second Pass notes, the plot is secondary and the characters so vague that they can be nothing but archetypes. The prose can be commended separately I suppose, but when putting it in service to such a mediocre tale, it makes a person wonder what the point is.

Perhaps a bit more surprising is the inclusion of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which I read in high school and thought was for the same sorts of people who thought ‘enlightenment ala Robert Pirsig’ was cool. Maybe I just don’t get the Beat writers. But the exclusion of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was quite shocking. Not so much because of the call for decanonization, but instead that it is part of the canon in the first place. I really liked the book when I read it last month, but would I have classified it as a must-read? Of course not.

I’ve begun to wonder what other books might be excised from the foreboding list of all literature that you must read. The Merry Wives of Windsor for sure, as well as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, a novel I found so incredibly overrated that it put me off of later-Roth for the better part of a year. The poetry of Sir Philip Sidney. But with the loose definition of canon used by The Second Pass, perhaps it wouldn’t actually be that hard to get rid of things, even books I loved. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was fantastic, but no one is going to read that in fifty years.

I suppose lists of ‘canonical’ books are interesting because they give a reader a place to start, but as the piece points out, the lists are so long that one has nowhere near the amount of time to actually make it through everything (even leaving out the great books that would be written between now and the end of that reader’s life). So the impulse to throw out some of the ‘canon’ to make it more manageable makes sense, but somehow I doubt throwing out ten books really makes all that much of a difference.

A question: which books have you read that you would consider recommending against and adding to the list?

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

‘The alarm bell of anxiety’ that Alfred and Enid Lambert hear ringing on the first page of The Corrections will ring for the reader as well throughout the first 12 pages of Jonathan Franzen's much-hyped third novel. The belabored metaphors suffusing these pages and the hysteria of an episode in which nothing more happens than the mailman comes to the door will make even the most forgiving of readers wonder, ‘Should I actually read the next 540 pages of this?’

The answer is yes. Not only does the novel immediately improve, but the realization that Franzen probably intended the difficult beginning comes quickly, when Chip, Alfred and Enid's feckless middle child, is introduced. Fired by the college where he taught for sleeping with a student, Chip relocates to New York City where he takes up part-time legal proofreading, writing for an arts monthly, and begins work on a screenplay entitled ‘The Academy Purple,’ which opens with a six page monologue. ‘My idea,’ Chip tries to explain to his girlfriend as she's leaving him, is ‘to have this 'hump' that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something off-putting at the beginning, it's a classic modernist strategy. There's a lot of rich suspense toward the end.’

It seems too obvious to be a coincidence — the hump at the beginning of the screenplay reflecting the hump at the beginning of the novel, especially as the care and control that Franzen exerts over his characters, their relationships and the locales they inhabit in the remainder of the novel becomes apparent. Nothing else in the book is as clunky as the opening pages.

There is not much plot to The Corrections: Enid, the social-climbing, prudish, delusionally optimistic matriarch, wishes to reunite her family in the fictional midwestern city of St. Jude (St. Louis) for one final Christmas. The enthusiasm of the other family members for a holiday together is muted.

Alfred, afflicted with Parkinson's disease and increasingly addled by dementia, is too concerned with his weakening mind to pay much attention to Enid's plans. Irascible and emotionally distant, the principled, repressed man is left confused and only occasionally lucid; he struggles constantly to comprehend what's around him, but it's an effort he's growing weary of, a mental state artfully and disturbingly described by Franzen.

The Lambert children are wary of returning home for their own reasons. Gary, the eldest son, a banker, is married to the beautiful but manipulative Caroline, who refuses to travel to St. Jude and wages war on Gary through their three sons, bribing the boys with Broadway tickets and computer games to stay home with her in Philadelphia. Chip, who impulsively flies to Lithuania with the ex-husband of his ex-girlfriend to start up an Internet fraud scheme, is seeking to avoid what he sees as the multiple failures of his life. Denise, the youngest child, is a hip, tense, talented, workaholic, sexually confused gourmet chef, whose separate affairs with the owner of the restaurant she works for and his wife get her fired. None see time spent together as the means to alleviate any of those issues. That all three are in St. Jude by Christmas morning is surprising to Enid and the reader until he/she realizes that for the book to work a final gathering of the family is necessary and therefore inevitable.

Franzen's ability to craft over 500 compelling pages out of this small domestic drama is a credit to his skills as a novelist. He manages, with the novel's relatively small cast of characters and minimal storyline, to cover topics as diverse as consumerism, the restaurant business (though not altogether accurately), the love-hate tension of intimate relationships, the collapse of Lithuania's political system, metallurgy, the stock market and cruise ship culture.

The book's only distracting flaw is a lengthy bit about Axon Corporation, a biotech firm developing a 'revolutionary' treatment for brain disorders and mental illnesses. Gary and Denise attend an investment luncheon given by the company; there's a video, and a painful question and answer session. This portion is a too-blunt bit of social commentary, and a not very original one. The trend to medicalize quirks of personality and moods, and consumers' willingness to be medicated, has been thoroughly examined many times before, and as a central theme of the novel, fails to resonate.

Franzen's commentary is more effective, his satire more cutting, when embedded in a character's activities or opinions. Enid, expecting an elegant, sophisticated experience on a cruise up the East Coast, is confronted instead with people wearing T-shirts marked with sayings such as ‘Old Urologists Never Die, They Just Peter Out.’ Her resentment — ‘It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive’ — is double-edged. Enid wants to be those people even as she reviles them.

The real success of the novel, though, lies not in the commentary but in the characters — Alfred and Enid are especially alive. They evolve, in the course of the novel, from being caricatures of Midwestern suburbia to being fully realized people, with a complexity and dignity rare in fictional characters, even as their progression diverges dramatically. Alfred declines to the point of needing a nursing home; Enid reveals a capacity for self-awareness and growth not hinted at in the book's beginning. The remaining Lamberts and the other characters are less-finely drawn, although each has a distinctive voice and perspective not likely to be confused with any other character. Franzen’s only real misfire is that the denouement seems to implicate one character as responsible for the ills of the others, and with his removal from the playing field, everyone else’s life gets remarkably, if perhaps coincidentally, better.

Near the end of the novel, Chip has an epiphany. He realizes why no one, including himself, liked his screenplay: He'd written a tragedy instead of a farce. 'Make it ridiculous,' he says to himself. It seems like another insight from the screenplay into the novel, perhaps one Franzen had himself in the early drafting process, a reminder that to read the story of the Lambert family too seriously is misguided.

The Mystery Genre

I suppose the term ‘mystery story’ is basically a huge umbrella term for any number of subgenres: the detective story, the romantic suspense, etc. Perhaps a necessary element is crime, and more specifically murder, and the seeking of a successful solution to the mystery at hand. Suspense arises in the course of the seeking of said solution, which laces those pursuing the perpetrator and/or innocent victims in jeopardy. Yet, it seems that much of what we consider ‘mystery stories’ doesn’t fall neatly into these categories.

As Joyce Carol Oates writes in the introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, ‘crimes can occur without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crimes. Violent and irrevocable actions can destroy lives but bring other lives together in unforeseeable, unimaginable ways.’

In reading this collection of twenty stories, I found myself enjoying the stories that didn’t neatly fit into the classic definition of the ‘mystery story.’ Edward P. Jones’s ‘Old Boys, Old Girls,’ follows a man in prison and afterwards, yet there is no real mystery to be solved only the effects of the man’s lifestyle and incarceration to witness as he cautiously reunited with a family he hasn’t seen in twenty years. Daniel Orozco’s ‘Officers Weep’ is an interesting tale of two cops falling in love told through the device of a police blotter. Scott Turow’s ‘Loyalty’ is about a man struggling to find himself after leaving his wife, with the crime elements only incidental to the plot of romantic/filial love.

Oates picked these stories because they embody a different way of looking at the genre so defined by Sherlock Holmes and Law and Order. It’s not necessarily about the crime and apprehending the suspect, but instead about how situations that very well may be criminal affect those going through them, whether as perpetrator or victim. Or bystander for that matter.

This past year, I have begun to read more and more fiction classified as ‘mystery’ because of some of the fiction marketed as ‘literary’ had large mystery elements and were some of the stories I enjoyed the most. I am prone to believe, as Michael Chabon has said time and again, that genre classifications are hindering and unnecessary, so I don’t want to compile some sort of list that surveys what I personally like and dislike about the nebulous ‘mystery genre.’

Instead, I’d just like to say that novels such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and In the Woods by Tana French are some of the best fiction I’ve read this year, and are two novels that a year before I probably never would have looked into I wasn’t a person who really read ‘mystery.’

None of us are immune to being elitist or viewing the world with blinders, especially when it comes to choices we make in our entertainment. Just a reminder that you, and definitely I, may be missing some damn good stuff.

Three Brief Reviews

Since reading a few of the very short stories by J. Robert Lennon in Michael Chabon's Best American Short Stories, I've been yearning for the full collection, Pieces for the Left Hand, to be published here in America. It finally arrived last month, and the other 92 stories (called 'anecdotes' on the front cover) don't disappoint. Lennon's stories are a bit unsettling for the very reason that they are so entertaining. An escalation in a high school rivalry leads to kidnapping. A woman who used to allow some mice to be killed in traps in order to save others is haunted when as a obstetrician she must advise mothers of multiples to cull a few to let the others live. You see how it is.

While the collection is enjoyable, the short nature of the anecdotes can make sustained reading problematic. Best enjoyed the way they were presented in BASS, my advice would be to only read a handful at a time. Rapid succession of the stories causes them to lose resonance, and sometimes the best thing to read before going to sleep is something just unsettling enough to make you pray for calm dreams.

I've never kept up with the X-Men on any sort of regular basis, but browsing a few of the recent collections has piqued my interest. Endangered Species takes place after the Scarlet Witch has reduced the number of mutants in the world from tens of millions to a couple of hundred based solely upon her words. Beast is consumed with the desire to preserve his race, going so far as to solicit help from some of the X-Men's staunchest foes. While the story is fairly moving and one cannot help but empathize with Hank McCoy, the inclusion of so many characters out of any broader context was very confusing. This is especially true of Dark Beast, a sort of mirror universe Beast who has dark brown fur and no conscience when it comes to experimentation. As one might expect, the mutant/Jew angle is played up and after so many times down this road it just isn't as powerful as it once was. All this said, I am taking effort to go back and read the tales that preceded this one in order to help make sense of the current Marvel universe. Perhaps this will change my opinion of the collection, but for now I give it a moderate thumbs up.

There is only one reason that I watched Charlie Wilson's War earlier this week: Aaron Sorkin. He writes some of the best dialogue being filmed today, but you wouldn't know it from watching this film. Tom Hanks plays Rep. Charlie Wilson from Texas who pretty much single-handedly arms the freedom fighters in Afghanistan in their battle against their Soviet oppressors. An interesting story, one that seems pretty much accurate to the true events, but just lacks the sort of verve one wants in a movie experience. Julia Roberts plays a completely unbelievable rich Houston woman, while Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another fantastic performance as CIA agent Gust Avrakotos. If for anything, you should watch this film for his performance.

Maybe it isn't fair that I am against it Sorkin's script just because it didn't dance like The American President or The West Wing even though it's about politics. But what really didn't work for me was the sort of moral stuck to the end. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall fell, Americans wouldn't spend even a few million dollars to help the Afghans rebuild their infrastructure: read here schools and hospitals. As a result, Sorkin draws the obvious line between those decisions almost twenty years ago and the state of Afghanistan today. Anyone who has read anything about the Mideast country in the past seven years already knows this, and playing out this little piece of history, despite its entertainment value, didn't serve to drive home the point any more directly for this viewer. Instead, I felt like my intelligence was insulted.