Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Christopher Hitchens once called Lucky Jim the funniest novel of the second half of the twentieth century. I don't think I can agree with that assessment--in fact, I would give my vote to Amis fils' novel Money, or maybe A Confederacy of Dunces--but I can understand the sentiment. The savagery of its satire, and its send-up of the British academic universe, are exactly what I would expect would make Hitchens laugh. It does contain what I think is probably the best description of a hangover ever written:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

He will feel worse, when he discovers that he has burned a hole in the sheets of his host, Professor Welch, who happens to be the Dean of History at the provincial college where Dixon is a lecturer in history. Dixon's job is in danger--for other similar unintentional shenanigans--and his attempts to ingratiate himself to Welch are complicated by the fact that Welch is an insufferable blowhard, and so is his son, the painting Bertrand:

It was Bertrand who won the little contest. "The point is that the rich play an essential role in modern society," he said, his voice baying a little more noticeably. "More than ever in days like these. That's all; I'm not going to bore you with the stock platitudes about their having kept the arts going, and so on. The very fact that they are stock platitudes proves my case. And I happen to like the arts, you sam."

The last word, a version of "see," was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short "a," as if he were going to say "sat." This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible "m." After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with "You do," which he tried to make knowing and sceptical.

That's pretty funny, and it's funnier when Amis begins to slip this tic in elsewhere; at one point, Bertrand uses the word "obviouslam." To make matters worse, Bertrand has a very pretty girlfriend--blowhards often do--named Christine, who seems to fancy Dixon, though he himself is tied up with a manipulative and not very attractive girl named Margaret.

Much of the best comedic bits in Lucky Jim depict Dixon trying to navigate his precarious social and professional situation, and sometimes just pursuing sheer malice, through a series of pranks and tricks. He hides the sheets; he calls the Welch home pretending to be a reporter looking for Betrand; he writes a threatening letter to a rival pretending to be someone else. This is funnier because he isn't good at it, and is always being found out. The mockery quickly becomes something of a compulsion, reaching a disastrous head when Dixon, intoxicated, can't stop himself from delivering a public lecture while mimicking Welch:

When he'd spoken about half-a-dozen sentences, Dixon realixed that something was still very wrong. The murmuring in the gallery had grown a little louder. Then he realised what it was that was so wrong: he'd gone on using Welch's manner of address. In an effort to make his script sound spontaneous, he'd inserted an "of course" here, a "you see" there, an "as you might call it" somewhere else; nothing so firmly recalled Welch as that sort of thing. Further, in a partly unconscious attempt to make the stuff sound right, i.e. acceptable to Welch, he'd brought in a number of favourite Welch tages: "integration of the social consciousness," "identification of work with craft," and so on... Sweating and flushing, he struggled on a little further, hearing Welch's intonation clinging tightly round his voice, powerless for the moment to strip it away.

Ultimately, Dixon is only able to continue by mimicking someone else, and passes through a number of different voices before collapsing on stage. To some extent this is what Dixon deserves, not because he is a trickster but because he is as much a sham as anyone else. His recently finished article, "The economic influence of the development in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485," bores him to death, and was only written to please his superiors and lead the expected life of an academic:

Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own uselessness and significance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.

Being a comedy, things will work out for Dixon. But it isn't at all clear to me that he deserves them, except perhaps in that he seems to know he is a sham, which is something Professor and Bertrand Welch refuse to admit. But the title suggests that maybe deserving the girl, the job, etc., is irrelevant:

It was all very bad luck on Margaret, and probably derived, as he'd thought before, from the anterior bad luck of being sexually unattractive. Christine's more normal, i.e. less unworkable, character no doubt resulted, in part at any rate, from having been lucky with her face and figure. But that was simply that. To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as nonexistent or in some way beneath consideration. Christine was still nicer and prettier than Margaret, and all the deductions that could be drawn from that fat should be drawn: there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

This is an interesting statement, and a troubling one, though it forms the lynchpin of the novel's serious treatment of moral questions. How then, do we revise our understanding of the luck that has enabled someone like Bertrand Welch to become a privileged, leisurely artist? As Hitchens notes, Dixon avers that "he badly needed another dose of luck. If it came, he might yet prove to be of use to somebody." The lucky Welches have spent their lives being useless to precisely no one--that's why they're academics, har har--and Amis leaves us with the suggestion that maybe Dixon, lucky for the first time in his life, might be able to make better use of it.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March begins with America:

I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

And ends with it, too:

Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

In his introduction, Christopher Hitchens identifies Augie's opening assertion as essentially radical. Augie, a Jew and the descendant of immigrants, claims an American birthright, unthinkable in the 1920's of the novel's opening and not much less so when it was written in 1953. We are inheritors of this assertion and will not find it strange; most of us will take it for granted that America is land of opportunity, an immigrant nation, where the ladders of social mobility can be scaled quicker.

Still, we can appreciate Augie's bold claim to exhibit a new conception of our national character. Augie is an American, that is to say, democratic. He tells us early on that the phrase "various jobs" is the "Rosetta stone" of his existence, and indeed his "adventures" can be summed as a series of tasks: He is a dog groomer, a union organizer, a petty thief, a sales clerk, a ship's pharmacist, an assistant to more than one millionaire. In one of the book's greatest sections, he spends a long period in Mexico training an eagle to hunt lizards. Some of these jobs are menial and low-class and others come with fancy wardrobes, but the overall line of progression is fluctuated, not upward as in some Horatio Alger story. When I say that Augie is democratic, this is what I mean--the dogged insistence that meaning and fulfillment, though not likely to be found, can be approached from all sides and all stations:

"How is your campaign after a worthwhile fate, Augie?" asked Clem, for he knew a lot about me, you see. Alas, why should he kid me so! I was only trying to do right, and I had broken my dome, lost teeth, got burned in the progress, a mighty slipshod campaigner. Lord, what a runner after things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie! Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.

Democratic, too, are Augie's attitudes toward people. On his ship during wartime he becomes a sort of confidant and advice-giver for his shipmates and tells us, "I advocated love, especially." Love is democratic because it regards social class, like all other concerns alien to mere personhood, as irrelevant. Augie's attitude reminds me of the King of France from King Lear, who remarks that "Love is not love / When it is mingled with regards that stand / Aloof from th'entire point." So it happens that, in my favorite section of the book, Augie risks estrangement from his heiress girlfriend, Lucy, in order to help a a friend obtain an illegal abortion. Lucy's parents believe he is mixed up with the girl sexually, not that it would matter if he weren't, and Augie mistakenly expects from Lucy the same kind of inconsiderate love that he gives freely:

Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn't remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the coutns were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had only to do with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love.

But love for others is not always the same as love for Augie, who has no conception of the love of money or the love of power. When he calls himself, at book's end, a "Columbus of those near-at-hand," he celebrates the love of people, the personal, individual life as opposed to the "big machine" which only has the power to oppose.

No wonder, then, that Bellow rejects the prose of Hemingway--who might be called typically American in that he exalts the stark, shorn pioneerism of Emerson and Thoreau--in favor of a looser, more exuberant style that is democratic in the sense that no word seems to excessive to leave out. Augie March is dense and allusive, delighting in its metaphors. The hem of a dress is "stiff as a line of Euclid." Elsewhere "the wheat looked like the glass of wheat." The human heart "circulates and warms, when it's piled at any bar or break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps." It is easy to lose the thread, and such long-windedness fails perhaps as often as it succeeds, but one comes to feel that, like Augie, such failures must be permitted.

Hitchens refuses to call it "The Great American Novel," though apparently Martin Amis does so freely. I myself categorically reject the existence of such a thing, but I will note that Augie March is obsessed with the reason that such a novel is impossible: America is too vast, too broad, too pluralistic to be pinned down. It is, in short, like Augie.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Could a man ride home in the rear smoker, primly adjusting his pants at the knees to protect their crease and rattling his evening paper into a narrow panel to give his neighbor elbow room? Could a man sit meekly massaging his headache and allowing himself to be surrounded by the chatter of beaten, amiable husks of men who sat and swayed and played bridge in a stagnant smell of newsprint and tobacco and bad breath and overheated radiators?

Hell, no. The way for a man to ride was erect and out in the open, out in the loud iron passageway where the wind whipped his necktie, standing with his feet set wide apart on the shuddering, clangoring floor-plates, taking deep pulls from a pinched cigarette until its burning end was a needle of fire and quivering paper ash and then snapping it straight as a bullet into the roaring speed of the roadbed, while the suburban towns wheeled slowly along the pink and gray dust of seven o'clock. And when he came to his own station the way for a man to alight was to swing down the iron steps and leap before the train had stopped, to land running and slow down to an easy, athletic stride as he made for his parked automobile.

Revolutionary Road is a desperately sad book, and sadder for its realism: Here is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a young, good-looking couple with small children living a plain life in the Connecticut suburbs outside of New York City. Frank and April are bright and well-educated, and both yearn for something more than a life as excruciatingly ordinary as the one they have, and rightfully so: Yates' depiction of the suburbs is almost paralyzing in its dullness. And yet at the same time, Frank and April are so cavalier and spiteful about their surroundings, even when trying not to be, they come across childish, and their aspirations lead them to quarrel and ultimately into tragedy.

What is horrifying about Revolutionary Road is that Frank and April are more everyman and everywoman than they suspect; or at the very least everyman-or-woman-who-might-pick-up-this-novel. Their suspicions of suburban life walk a narrow line between legitimacy and egoism, falling alternately into one realm or the other and exposing how similar the two can be. To indict Frank and April is to indict anyone who has entertained, as Frank and April do, the notion of pulling up stakes and moving to Europe (and admit it--haven't you?).

Frank and April decide to do exactly that, jobs and children be damned, and we must wonder whether they would have gone through with it if not for a single event that complicates things mightily (and which I shall not reveal). The scuttling of this plan leads to the widening of the already apparent rift between the two, to the escapism of adultery, and finally serves to cast a light on the futility, emptiness, and frustration that characterize suburban life. The final act is unbearably gruesome, but grimly appropriate.

I didn't love Revolutionary Road; it was too bleak for me. I can handle a book like The Road, which is horrifying and grotesque but takes place in a world that seems far removed from our own, but the world which we do inhabit has only become more like Revolutionary Road in the past fifty years. Yikes.

N.B.: Christopher Hitchens' recent review for the Atlantic Monthly is excellent.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling (pt. 1)

Note: In the interest of readability, and avoiding spoilers before Brent has read it, I have broken my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into several parts--just like the film adaptation. The first is a general post-mortem review of the entire Harry Potter Series.

When the seventh and final Harry Potter book appeared in July of last year, it became officially time for the cultural establishments of our world to look at the series as a whole and begin to discuss its place in the scope of world literature. That Harry Potter has made zealots of both his supporters and detractors is no secret; the images of Potterites young and old decked in glasses and orange-and-maroon Gryffindor scarves are fresh in our minds, balanced on the other side by the now less-frequent news reports of suburban parents challenging the books’ inclusion in their children’s school libraries. (Let’s not forget, Harry opens “a doorway that will put untold millions of kids into Hell.”)

But there are Harry-haters more respectable than Jack Chick, and none has more literary gravitas than Harold Bloom, the famous Yale critic who might be the world’s most well-read man. In an article that leads with Bloom’s disgust over the National Book Foundation’s presentation of an award to Stephen King, he targets Harry Potter as a particularly nefarious cog in the war machine that’s been sent to obliterate the literary awareness of the Western world: “I suffered a great deal in the process [of reading it],” he writes. “The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible.” One shivers at the image of poor septuagenarian Bloom forcing himself choke down another page of such drivel, while his collection of Romantic busts look on with horror. Lining up with Bloom on the anti-Harry side are prominent literary figures like A.S. Byatt, and a gaggle of literary and social critics.

Of course, Bloom is describing only his reaction to the first book, which underwhelmed me as well, and when he states that the Harry Potter books are unlikely to introduce kids to better-written children’s novels, he’s probably correct. The idea that Harry Potter is a net social good because it gets kids reading is not only a well-meaning falsehood, it’s a red herring of Hagrid-like proportions. Even if it were true, it would do little to help us judge the books on an aesthetic level—not to mention the fact that our children’s literacy is a burden meant for us, not Rowling.

On the other side of the divide are folks like that bete noir of Bloom’s, Stephen King, whose defense of the Potter books borders on adulation. I have unfairly singled out this one of King’s commendations as patently ridiculous: “Talent is never static, it's always growing or dying, and the short form on Rowling is this: She was far better than R.L. Stine (an adequate but flavorless writer) when she started, but by the time she penned the final line of Deathly Hallows (''All was well.''), she had become one of the finer stylists in her native country — not as good as Ian McEwan or Ruth Rendell (at least not yet), but easily the peer of Beryl Bainbridge or Martin Amis.”

King might have chosen two names at random. While I happen to agree with King on sentiment—Rowling has become a much better writer, something which I believe began with the fourth book—this affirmation is nonsensical. Amis’ Money, a book which I love, is composed of an inspired satirical style that combines the beautiful with the crude. I found it quite affecting. But of course, that’s what Amis meant to do—he is a writer in control of his prose, and can use it to create emotion, pace, and meaning. Can we say any of these things of Rowling?

That Rowling has learned to get out of her own way by the seventh book is a testament to her growth as an author, but if we are serious we must admit that in the entirety of the series great stylistic moments are hard to come by. The image of Hogwarts is strong in our minds, but I can find no passages in which Rowling’s style is up to her extensive imagination; if our mental picture of Hogwarts is vivid it is because of what it is and not the way it is described (and is attributable, I think, in no small part to the films). The dialogue, while frequently clever when it comes to cracking jokes, stumbles mightily in moments of great intensity or meaning, except perhaps for some of the more intimate moments between Dumbledore and Harry. Even the line which King holds in such high regard as the exemplar of the series’ growth—Mrs. Weasley’s battle-cry of “NOT MY DAUGHTER, BITCH!”—seems guilty of the lazy trick of resorting to unexpected profanity. Cue the “ooooohs” from the soundtrack.

But even in the places of the final book where Rowling’s prose remains clumsy or wooden, I am seldom bothered by it anymore. Rowling isn’t Amis, but so what? Why do we need her to be? Is it necessary for the Harry Potter books to be a great work of literature for us to appreciate them?

If we look at them only as literature, I suppose. This may seem a strange thing to say—after all, literature is what they are, right?—but the truth is that by any serious metric, the reality about Rowling’s magnum opus is closer to the conceptions of Bloom and Byatt than that of King. The prose, while much improved, never quite reaches anything worthy of being called “good,” and the plot is frequently contrived to the point of absurdity. Too often the best ideas and characters are mired in a mish-mash of half-baked concepts, confusing plot points, and clichés.

But I maintain that the best way of viewing the Harry Potter series is not a simply literature, but as a cultural event. The books are a big part of it, of course—the biggest—but so are the films, the video games, the action figures, the fan fiction, all of that. We live in a world that perceives itself to be so embattled in the “culture wars” and lacking truly shared cultural icons that the emergence of Harry into the pantheon that includes Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Luke Skywalker is welcome as proof that pop culture remains well and alive in my generation. I mention those examples because they are ones I believe exist in our cultural consciousness not merely as envisioned by their creators but through the eyes of hundreds or thousands of creative minds. Of course, gentlemen named Disney, Siegel and Shuster, and Lucas own the lion’s share of the way those figures and their respective universes are perceived, but their pull on our imaginations is so strong that we have been reinventing them for decades.

There was long speculation that Rowling might kill Harry off at the end of the series; this idea was spurred on by the thought that by doing so Rowling could protect him from other writers—who are cast in this scenario in quite a predatory light—who might wish to continue his story by their own hand. But Rowling went in the opposite direction, ending Harry’s journey—and, as King writes, “if you think that's a spoiler at this late date, you were never much of a Potter fan to begin with”—with the simple sentence “All was well,” assuring not only Harry’s survival but his health and happiness. I do not know if Rowling has considered that this might leave Harry open to such literary poachers, but it is my hope that she considered the possibility and considered it good. Certainly such a move leaves the characters open to be perverted and diluted—I’m sure Harry Potter: The Animated Series isn’t too far off—but I think it also will help Harry to remain a living, vibrant character. Of course, I have no statistical evidence on the popularity of Superman to back myself up, but I feel as if having Harry alive is on its face the best thing for his legacy. This way, he belongs to us all now.

With all due respect to Dr. Bloom and Mr. King, I hold with the middle road walked by Christopher Hitchens, a man not known for his moderateness: “It is given to few authors to create a world apart, and to populate it as well as illustrate it in the mind. As one who actually did once go to boarding school by steam train, at 8, I enjoyed reading aloud to children and coming across Diagon Alley and Grimmauld Place, and also shuddering at the memory of the sarcastic schoolmasters (and Privet Drives) I have known.” I can think of no better description of the Potter series’ strengths: its endless and captivating inventiveness, and the way that it plays to our deeply held desire to find reflected in our literature the familiar and the mysterious both.

And if there’s really a culture war going on, put me squarely on King’s side against the Blooms and Byatts of this world. It’s a post-modern world now, the era of the lowbrow, no matter how tightly Bloom holds the keys to the canon.