Fiction Mondays: The Lacuna

I'd never read Barbara Kingsolver before (even though The Poisonwood Bible is supposed to be excellent), but when I heard about her most recent novel The Lacuna, it sounded like something I had to check out.  I originally bought it as a Christmas present for my girlfriend, who is a big fan of Frida Kahlo, a major character in the book, and she raved about it.

The story moves from Mexico after the first World War to Washington, DC during the Bonus Army era, back to Mexico for Frida's rise to fame and visit from Trotsky, and finally back to America in the wake of his murder, where the protagonist comes under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.  It's a whirlwind plot, all centered around a character named Harrison Shepherd, a writer who began as a cook in Mexico and came to work for the U.S. State Department, transporting paintings during World War II.  Kingsolver doesn't tell the story in the usual way, though: the story is presented through journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and archival notes that record Harrison's journey around the continent.  Through this method, she presents a character whose internal world is constantly hidden away from his public life.

The title of the book describes this disconnect, and the word "lacuna" is used throughout the novel in a variety of ways.  The first is simply a cave in a cliff: a missing piece that Harrison follows as a child to discover a tucked-away Aztec ruin.  But it also means a missing piece of a manuscript, and in the case of Harrison, it's a missing notebook that documents Harrison's expulsion from school (for "improper acts" with another boy).  Throughout the book, the idea of the lacuna appears in a variety of ways: letters between characters where the reader only sees one half of the conversation, or a statement made over and over that the most important piece of a story might be the piece that's left out.  In trying to reconstruct his life through his letters and diaries, Harrison's stenographer, Violet Brown, hopes to fill in that piece.

This is an unabashedly political novel, as much about Communism and World War II as it is about art and fiction.  In fact, the driving force is how these things become intertwined.  It's Harrison's association with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera that initially exposes him to Communist ideas, and the same association that brings him to work for the State Department, moving artwork from Washington, DC to Asheville to keep it from being destroyed during the war.  And it is in part the same association that brings him under scrutiny during the Communist "witch hunt":  When Harrison becomes a well-known novelist, his history in Mexico is discovered, as is his association with Trotsky and Rivera.  By the time his trial is underway, it doesn't matter that Trotsky opposed Stalin.  All Soviet Communists (in the eyes of the committee) are the same.  The politics in the novel aren't contained to history, though, and there was a great line about how the radio made it so that the loudest talkers, and not the most knowledgeable, ended up finding the widest audience.  If this isn't Kingsolver calling out pundits, I don't know what is.

The format, telling the story in a less direct way, is risky, and for this book, it pays off.  Considering how important the public portrayal of Harrison becomes as the novel goes on, approaching from the viewpoint of his diaries, intermingled with real newspaper clippings, embedded the story in the real world as well as his emotions.  And getting a lot of the story told in Harrison's voice makes for a really engaging read.   I think it's a challenging feat to pull off, and there's a chance your readers will lose the plot between journal entries, but I think Kingsolver is a talented enough writer to give you the story that lives in those gaps, and I think that's what this book is really about.

Friday Films: The Casablanca Effect

This week, a pair of interesting columns popped up in the New York Times and the Washington Post talking about the current cinematic landscape, particularly in terms of romantic comedies.  Over at the NYT, Maureen Dowd has a conversation with author Sam Wasson, wondering how romantic comedies went from Bringing up Baby to The Bounty Hunter.  A valid concern, I'd say.  In the past ten years, romantic comedies tend to be the same old thing, reheated and reconstituted to pretend they're not the same old thing.

In the Post, Jen Chaney argues that there have been a few romantic comedies in the past that break the mold and end up changing the genre enough to be interesting and enjoyable.  She cites (500) Days of Summer and Up in the Air, both of which I really enjoyed.  To that list I would add one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I don't know if that really counts as a romantic comedy, but it's a movie about two people falling in love, told in reverse.  But what don't these movies have?

Happy endings.

Spoilers ahead, if you haven't seen these movies.

In "(500) Days of Summer," we are warned right up front: "this is not a love story."  It's about a relationship, about the course of falling in and out of love.  Sure, the ending has Joseph Gordon Levitt meeting a girl and the possibility of another story (visualized by resetting the "day count" back to "1"), but the real plot is about getting together and falling apart.  "Up in the Air" is about a closed-off man opening up and getting hurt by a woman he falls for.  And even though the two characters get together at the end of "Eternal Sunshine," we all know it could be a very turbulent path.  I believe an alternate ending had them erasing each other and meeting, over and over.

What does it mean that the better romantic comedies have a streak of cynicism, of admitting that things just don't work out like they do (for lack of a better phrase) in the movies?  Maybe they're a reflection of their time, or maybe it's just a way of going against the crop of lame and boring romantic comedies that keep on popping up, year after year.  I really don't know for sure.  But I know it's not the first time there have been a lot of romantic comedies where people don't get together: the 1960s had a ton.  Sam Wasson even talks about Annie Hall, a movie that works so well because they don't end up together. 

I'm not trying to figure out why these movies tend to be better--I guess I'll just sum it up as "The Casablanca Effect," where there's something more honest and more identifiable without that happy ending.  The idea is that the story continues offscreen, which somehow becomes more romantic.

Musical Wednesdays: The Suburbs

For the past few weeks, I've been hearing individual tracks from the Arcade Fire's new album, The Suburbs, on the radio.  To be honest, I wasn't overly impressed.  The songs were okay, and some of them were great a few minutes in, but there was no single that completely wowed me.  I was worried, because the band's earlier albums, Funeral and Neon Bible, are some of my favorites.  I stopped worrying when I heard the whole album, though.

I've read a lot of music critics who talk about the album as a dead object, an artifact of the pre-iTunes world.  "People put their music on shuffle," they say.  I am paraphrasing.  But the new Arcade Fire album disagrees.  Like the Decemberists' Hazards of Love, "The Suburbs" is a long-player, an album designed to go together as a whole.  And when I finally listened to it as that, I felt like I understood what they were doing.

The first track, the title track, is like a statement of the album's themes:

"Kids wanna be so hard
But in my dreams we're still screamin' and runnin' through the yard
And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall
And all of the houses they build in the seventies finally fall
Meant nothin' at all"

The spread of the suburbs vs. the fear of the bomb is, I think, the driving idea of the album.  A landscape of poorly-built houses that keeps on expanding, but toward what?  And what happens to the people who keep on building and expanding these suburbs?  I know these aren't exactly new themes, but I think this is the first record that does real justice to these ideas.

My current favorite track on the album, "City With No Children," touches on something that was present in the opening tracks of "Funeral," the idea of a neighborhood after the adults have gone.  In this song, the kids from that album have grown up, and the neighborhood is a wreck.  There's an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, with the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth and the mourners will be comforted.  The narrator of the song, and the whole album, seems to look around for that comfort, distraught over the suburban sprawl he has inherited.

I don't think any band uses setting in their songs quite like the Arcade Fire, and the new album really expands on that, asking what happens when the landscape becomes too much to bear, when it takes on a life of its own.  The album is huge, its themes and images spreading out as it goes on to encompass the regrets and nostalgia of its narrator.  It ends with a look back and the statement that "If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted, I'd only waste it again."  Sure, there are allusions to natural disasters, atomic cataclysm, and abandoned neighborhoods scattered throughout the album, but the resounding point of the album is that the most destructive force, the element that obliterates the memories and forces the narrator out into a more terrifying world, is time.

Fiction Mondays: Work in Progress

As promised last week, today I've got parts of a new story, fresh out of editing.  I think I'm becoming a better editor, and as a result my stories are getting leaner and (I think, at least) better.  Here's the opening of a story, currently titled "The Wolf," about two men who hear from their long-absent mother only on holidays, and what happens the day they don't.  The title is only temporary, until I think of a better one.

Sam stood by the kitchen counter, slicing a loaf of Italian bread into half-inch cubes when Dave came in holding the blue three-ring binder. Sam kept cutting, as though this task required his complete concentration, and didn’t look up at his brother until he had chopped most of the loaf and swept the cubes into a glass bowl. He carried the two ends, which he had not diced, to the table. He sat down and handed one to Dave.

“This is good bread,” Dave said, sinking his incisors into the round piece and tearing it like it was a piece of meat. “It’s really crusty and chewy.”

“It’s from the bakery in town. Need any butter, or olive oil?”

“No, that’s all right. Plain is fine.” Sam looked across the table, not yet starting on his bread. He had a habit, carried over from childhood, of watching Dave eat first, at least for a minute or two. It was strange, like seeing himself eat. Once, when he was very small, Sam even managed to convince himself that by watching his twin, he could fill his own stomach.

Dave had let his hair grow long and his beard had filled in, so they didn’t look like each other as much as they once had; for Sam, it was like seeing what he would look like if he lived outside for half the year, without regular access to hot water or a barber. It wasn’t that Dave looked dirty—the Park Service expected him to be presentable and professional—but Sam could see his discomfort in dress shoes, his glances into the backyard like he could not wait to get back out. Sam took a bite of his bread and looked at the tabs sticking out of the binder, each of them labeled. He wondered if it had gotten much thicker than the year before, or if it was just his imagination: considering the information inside, he wouldn’t be surprised if he dreamt it into a larger, more mythical collection.

“Do we have to break out the binder already? That can’t wait for dessert tomorrow?”

The binder is Dave's record of everything they know about their mother, from the phone calls to photographs of strangers who might be her.  This next scene is Sam's last memory of her before she left, and is one of my favorite scenes.

Rhea sat them both on the kitchen counter, the spot where she always placed her sons when she prepared them to leave the house; every morning she would have them sit there, Sam on the left and Dave on the right, to inspect their faces and fingernails.  It was the same counter where she gave them haircuts, looking from Dave to Sam to ensure her work was even.  Tonight, she sewed their shirts together, a seam that began two inches above the waist.

“Don’t move,” she said.  “If you wiggle around, the stitches might come undone.”  She took an ashtray from the kitchen table and examined the cigarette she had left there a few minutes earlier.  Satisfied that it was still lit, she took a long drag and regarded her sons.  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner,” she said. 

She finished sewing and tugged at the seam a few times before standing up straight, pleased with her work.  “Get your pillowcases,” she said.  “And hop down together, would you?  I don’t want to have to sew you up again.”  The twins shuffled off of the countertop and shambled, conjoined, down the hallway.  When they returned, Rhea told them they were going with the neighbors, that she would see them when they came back later that night.  She kissed each of them on the forehead and said she loved them, shepherding them outside.

Three hours later, after an evening of wandering the neighborhood with Margaret, the woman next door, and her children, the boys returned home to find their father sitting on the porch, drinking whiskey from an empty jam jar printed with Tom and Jerry cartoons.  The porch light cast sharp shadows across the lawn, the only illumination on the dirt road.  Sam knew almost instantly, before Margaret even put her hands on their shoulders, that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, the exact instant he and his brother, fused at the waist, transformed into pair of motherless freaks.

So that's about the first half.  I'm really happy with it so far, but like I said, the title is giving me some problems.  I am open to suggestions.

Friday Films: Some Thoughts on "Repulsion"

This week, I watched Roman Polanski's Repulsion, a horror movie about a young woman left alone who loses her mind.  I would never argue that Polanski isn't a great director, and I think he excels at horror.  Whether it's Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby or Knife in the Water, he is able to isolate his characters and create a slow-building sense of paranoia that overwhelms and causes them to see monsters.  Sometimes they're there, and sometimes they're not. 

In this film, an unstable young woman named Carol, who is terrified of men for a reason that is never explicitly explained (more on this later) finds herself alone in her apartment when her older sister goes on vacation.  She starts to have delusions of break-ins and sexual assaults, which jumble together with reality, causing her to attack a suitor and barricade herself in the apartment.  Her grasp on reality deteriorates, and she begins to see hands coming through the walls to grab her and phantom-men who assault her in her bed.  It is suggested, at least how I read it, that she was sexually assaulted as a child and had never confronted this fact.

While I was watching the film, though, I have to admit I had a hard time separating the film from its director.  Isolation, madness, and horror: these have some resonance in Polanski's life.  There's also his recurring theme of the young, innocent woman with sexual demons following her.  If you know about Polanski's life (and I think most everyone knows something about it), this might strike you as a little uncomfortable.

But regardless, Repulsion is an excellent art house horror film.  The cinematography is really impressive, as are the special effects (creepy hands coming out of the walls in particular)  The depiction of the descent into madness is really believable and terrifying.  For the first half, things move slowly and methodically, subtly ratcheting up the tension, until finally there is a moment where everything comes unhinged.

Musical Wednesdays: A White House Tribute to Paul McCartney

Tonight, PBS will air a new In Performance at the White House, a concert celebrating Paul McCartney as he's awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (he's the third person to ever receive it).  The ceremony actually took place about a month ago, and included performances by Emmylou Harris, Stevie Wonder, and many others. 

I love that these performances are occurring at the White House, because let's face it, they didn't happen there for eight years.  Even the first Gershwin Prize concert, honoring Paul Simon, took place at the Warner Theater, a few blocks from the White House.  So I like that they're bringing them inside, because it makes it less like the administration sees itself as above the popular culture of the country.

So by way of a preview, here is a video of Jack White at the concert, performing McCartney's "Mother Nature's Son."  Enjoy, and tune in tonight.  I hear Obama joins in for a big "Hey Jude" sing-along. 

Fiction Mondays: Arkansas and an Update

Last week's book was John Brandon's Arkansas, a novel that exists somewhere between literary fiction and neo-noir.  Or maybe it doesn't exist between them at all: it's a blend of the two.  The book follows Kyle, Swin, and Frog, three characters involved with the drug trade in the South whose stories run towards each other and intersect violently.

Swin Ruiz is a college dropout who still considers himself something of an intellectual.  When he runs out of money, he finds himself working with Kyle, who isn't the brightest, but is more suited to a life of crime.  The two become drug runners for Frog, who installs them at a state park where the ranger is his employee.  They never meet Frog, but he's an important character, with a significant portion of the book allotted to his backstory.  Every other chapter is written in the second person, forcing you to identify with Frog, whether you'd like to or not.

Swin and Kyle spend their days at the park, working for the ranger, Bright, between runs.  He's a strange character, with a collection of half-empty whiskey bottles and a box full of burnt bones in his house.  They have to do random work around the park between visits from Bright's other boss, a woman who dresses only in pink and gets a cut of the drug money.  While they're kind of idling around, Swin meets Johnna, a nurse who he begins dating.  The narrative, which is kind of loose and episodic, threatens to slow down at a few points early on, but the sections with Frog drive things forward leading to the moment things go wrong for Kyle and Swin.

You could say the idea behind the second half of the novel is that a criminal can be undone either by his stupidity, by emotions, or by chance.  When Bright is killed by a runaway, Swin and Kyle do their best to carry on without him, but neither one knows enough about the situation to really lead.  Everything they do leads Frog to suspect their motives, and as his backstory races toward its intersection with their plotline, you just know things are going to end poorly for them.  I guess the big surprise is what becomes of Frog at the end of the novel--if Kyle and Swin are destroyed by their own stupidity, Frog is nearly killed by his emotional investments in his employees.

But maybe the idea isn't just about what destroys the characters, because it's also about what saves them.  Kyle and Swin, Frog and his closest employees: they are family, in a strange sense.  Kyle and Swin realize this late in the novel and know they are the only ones they can depend on, to carry on their stories and to protect one another.  Frog is almost driven to madness when he realizes this about his own story.  If there's any redemption for the characters, it's through the people they have randomly wound up with. 

Brandon's writing is really engaging because it is so spare.  He seems to only want to give you enough to have a complete image of these characters, and his description of their actions and their internal monologues is at times off-putting because it is so clear and to the point.  Putting Frog's sections in second-person was a really wise decision--he would be a really difficult character to identify with in third-, or even first-person.  Brandon has a new book, out this summer, called Citrus County.  Based on the strengths of Arkansas, it is definitely one to check out.

Now, the update: I am going to post sections of a new story here next week!  It's one I've been editing for the past week, attacking with red pen.  And I'm really excited about it.  Check back here next Monday for at least part of it.