The YA Question, Part 1: John Green, _The Fault in Our Stars_

THIS PAST SPRING, I taught for the eighth or ninth time a course called "Modern Novel." As usual, for the final paper, the students had to read, research, and write on a recent (since 2000) novel of their own choosing. No student had before proposed reading a Young Adult novel, but this year four of them did, nominating The Book Thief, The Maze Runner, Divergent, and this one.

I decided to let all four projects proceed, although I asked the students to include in their papers discussion of the question of YA's relationship to other literary fiction. Basically, they all decided YA was OK.

The question has been circulated a good deal lately, thanks to Ruth Graham at Slate, who took the not-all-that-OK position, and the many people who responded to her. Since, in the line of professional duty, I actually did read The Fault in Our Stars, I figured I was qualified to ring in.

The novel is the first person narrative of a 16-year-old girl who has cancer. In a support group, she meets a boy her age who is in remission after a leg amputation. They fall in love, partly out of shared fandom, both being devotees of a (fictional) novel, An Imperial Affliction. Mystified by the novel's lack of  a proper ending, they use a Make-A-Wish Foundation sort of gift to go to Amsterdam to interview its famously reclusive and curmudgeonly author. No luck on that front, but they do consummate their relationship. However, it turns out the boy's cancer has returned; the last third or so of the book is about his dying.

I would say this is certainly an above-average YA novel. The narrator had her appealing side--she's a reader, obviously, and she was attractively impatient with cliché and even snarky about the support group's drumbeat of positive thoughts. I also appreciated the message that love, even when brief, temporary, and abruptly terminated, even with its promise of inevitable pain, is worthwhile; "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all," as Tennyson wrote, or, as Eliot wrote of "the awful daring of a moment's surrender," "by this, and this only, have we existed." As it may not be a good idea for a 14- or 15-year-old to tackle In Memoriam or The Waste Land, it's good to have something like The Fault in Our Stars around.

However--if one is a grown-up, and capable of reading grown-up books, one is better off doing exactly that, methinks. Given that in this brief, temporary, likely to be abruptly terminated life, one has only so much time to read, you should choose wisely how to spend that time. I acknowledge that my position goes against our broad American follow-your-bliss ethos, but suppose you had a 40-year-old friend who every day had Froot Loops for breakfast, macaroni and cheese for lunch, and pizza for dinner.  Suppose further this friend got no exercise.

Wouldn't you say, "You can't keep eating like a teenager"? Doesn't that guy (has to be a guy, don't you think?) need to re-evaluate how he follows his bliss?

One has to be mindful of the nourishment one takes in and the exercise one gets, no?

The mind too needs nourishment, and the mind too needs exercise. The adult mind is not going to get what it needs from YA.

Hilton Als, _White Girls_

HAVING READ ALS'S reviews here and there for many years, I expected to enjoy this, and some of it I had already read, but I was not at all prepared for anything as ambitious and outside-the-box as the two longer pieces here, "You and Whose Army?" and "Tristes Tropiques."

"You and Whose Army?" seems for a while to be a short story written in the voice of an actress who does vocal overdubs for porn, but then we tumble to the speaker's being Richard Pryor's sister...and then, about the time we realize, "oh, he's re-working Woolf's 'Shakespeare's Sister' passage," we hit a major dismantling of Woolf... and a far from wholly undeserved one, since Woolf has tended to get a free pass on the more rebarbative observations about servants and her Jewish in-laws that show up in her letters and journals. Things only accelerate from there.

Even more inventive and audacious is "Tristes Tropiques," about a... friend? companion? one hardly knows what to designate Als's relationship with the person he calls SL (for "Sir or Lady") in this sustained essay of not quite ninety pages; Als needs that much room to give us the dimensions of this relationship, and by the end of the essay you will know a lot about that relationship while still not having a name tag for it. The references and allusions throughout tend to be esoterically private, completely transparent only to a handful of people, one guesses, but as with James McCourt the insider-liness of the piece somehow manages to be enchanting rather than off-putting.

"Tristes Tropiques" ought to become a stable of ethnic, gender, and sexuality courses all over this land of ours--probably too much to hope for, but who knows?

Jim Walsh, _All Over but the Shouting: The Replacements: An Oral History_

ON THE EVIDENCE of this and McNeil's and McCain's superb Please Kill Me, the oral history form admirably suits the task of chronicling the fortunes of the Cool-but-not-Big rock band.

The Cool-vs.-Big dynamic has defined rock music in my lifetime, I would say. In the 1950s, Cool and Big tended to align: Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Everlys, Little Richard...all both Cool and Big.  Thanks to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and quite a few others, Cool and Big kept frequent company throughout the 1960s, even though we also saw such Big-but-not-Cool phenomena as Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon at the beginning of the decade and  the Grassroots and Three Dog Night at its end. More importantly, though, the 60s saw the advent of the first important Cool-but-not-Big band, the Velvet Underground.

The rift really opened in the 1970s. In addition to the usual wave of Big-but-not-Cool acts (the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Boston, Peter Frampton), we had an unprecedented wave of the Cool-but-not-Big: Big Star, the New York Dolls, the Stooges, Gram Parsons, Nick Drake, the Modern Lovers, Television, Patti Smith.  (The Sex Pistols would make the list in  the USA, but in the UK I gather they were actually pretty big.) The Big-and-Cool category was getting underpopulated. Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, perhaps Pink Floyd. (Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac, it seems to me, only became Cool later. Critical respect for them was sparse at the time.)

By the 1980s, Cool and Big had essentially divorced. Prince was Cool and Big; Madonna, possibly, though the only Madonna song I myself love is "Ray of Light." Some basically Cool 1980s bands hit the jackpot in the 1990s (REM, U2), but by and large the Cool Bands--Husker Du, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, and the irreplaceable Replacements--came not within miles of being Big. (Partly because a Cool band that betrayed any glimmer of a wish to be Big got pilloried in print by Steve Albini or Gerard Cosloy or some other self-appointed guardian of integrity.)

So back to my first point: would anyone ever want an oral history of Bon Jovi, which would be from the outset a tale of ambition, aesthetic compromises, opportunistic positioning, and eventual poisoned success?

No.

But an oral history that included the one cool record store in town, the bands practicing in basements, the xeroxed homemade flyers and zines, the van knee-deep in empty beer cans, the sticky-floored dives with a two dollar cover, the wing-and-a-prayer record labels...and, crucially, the passion? That is a story made for oral history, my friends, and Walsh puts together a nice one here. It was a story happening in much the same way all over the country, as Michael Azerrad's beautiful Our Band Could Be Your Life illustrates, but the Minneapolis version has an appeal uniquely its own.

Who knew Slim Dunlap was so thoughtful and articulate?  He is the real revelation here.

Edward St. Aubyn, _At Last_

BEFORE WE PROCEED to what is now St. Aubyn's next-to-most-recent novel--I found the normally reliable John Banville annoying when reviewing the most recent (Lost for Words) in NYRB.  Banville keeps his distance, for instance, from the praise St. Aubyn has won from his fellow novelists:

Edward St. Aubyn is a fine writer, much respected by his contemporaries. The five Patrick Melrose novels—the first of which, Never Mind, was published in 1992, and the last, appropriately titled At Last, in 2012—have received remarkable praise within the guild and without.

Calling St. Aubyn "lavishly gifted" at one point, he complains about "an impatient and unfinished quality" and "a not quite satisfactory mélange of styles and artistic attitudes," and so on. 

The new one is about a Booker-like novel prize, so perhaps they asked Banville  to write about it because he won a Booker…? (Cf. Anne Enright getting the invitation to review from the New York Times.)  Whatever it was, it's too bad. St. Aubyn deserves better.

Banville mentions Waugh, an almost inevitable touchstone for St. Aubyn's reviewers, only in order to get in a cheap shot:

St. Aubyn is regarded by many, including himself, perhaps, as the direct heir of Evelyn Waugh, and indeed, the Patrick Melrose series has many extended bravura passages of heartless comedy worthy of the master. But if St. Aubyn is no Proust, he is no Waugh, either.

Even though the Waugh comparison immediately suggest itself, At Last reminded me most of a different English novelist--Christopher Isherwood. First of all, there is the poise and control of the prose; Isherwood does not have quite the reputation in that department that Waugh does, but he deserves to, and he is just as witty as Waugh, too, when he chooses.

More crucially, Isherwood and Waugh are both insightful in their satire of the class in which they were raised, but Isherwood is more honest and intelligent about the way it fucked him up than Waugh is, and it is here--that insight into one's own fucked-up-ness--that St. Aubyn rivals Isherwood and surpasses Waugh. Again as in Isherwood, the intelligence that permits the insight into one's own fucked-up-ness cuts both ways, as it also slices and dices whatever suggests itself as a remedy to the fucked-up-ness; having seen through one's own problems, one also sees through whatever is sham or hypocritical about religion, or therapy, or philosophy…but then, in both Isherwood and St. Aubyn (and, I think, e.g., in Infinite Jest) the intelligence is also keen enough to understand its own limitations, self-justifications, subterfuges, and  the like.  Waugh almost got there once, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, but not the way Isherwood does in A Meeting at the River or St. Aubyn does in the final chapter of At Last, which is a strong conclusion to an amazing series of novels.

Thomas Pynchon, _Inherent Vice_

IT TOOK A while, as I was reading this, to decide whether I was enjoying it. In the early going, it seemed to be an (early-ish) Jonathan Lethem novel set in California. Eventually it occurred to me that Jonathan Lethem novels could be seen as Thomas Pynchon novels set in New York City, at which point I decided, well, okay, let's just have a good time.

To venture a broad generalization, I am going to say that through Inherent Vice (I have not read Bleeding Edge), Pynchon novels have tended to be either encyclopedic, immersive projects that span continents and embrace historico-philosophical themes (V., Gravity's Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, Against  the Day) or relatively focused exercises in California Noir that tried to understand the 1960s:  The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and now this one.

The novel is set in 1970, and private investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello...actually, there seems little point to summarizing the plot. It has the usual noir elements: mysterious clients, sleazy clubs, cars, cigarettes, low-pH wise-cracking dialogue, sexual opportunities, fisticuffs, deepening revelations, twists, betrayals, even the scene where a bad guy tells the bound hero, slated for execution, some important plot points and then leaves him alone for a few minutes in which he can engineer an escape. Behind it all, corrupted authority--"the Mob behind the Mob"--which indicates the true Pynchonian theme uniting his longer and his shorter projects: the Paranoid American Sublime.

Accordingly, we can read Inherent Vice as a pendant (admittedly, at 369 pages, a heavy pendant) to Against the Day, asking the larger novel's question about why some historical possibilities thrived and others withered, about what became of the possible liberation that was the blighted twin of the atrocity-ridden 20th century, but asking it about the 1960s. What happened to the 1960s? Heroin and COINTELPRO, which are linked in the plot in the character of Coy Harlingen.

Doc Sportello cannot un-do the wreckage of the 1960s, but Marlowe-like he does what he can, gets Coy back together with his wife and child and off the crypto-fascists' payroll. And in the novel's beuatiful coda, he follows an impromptu community of taillights through the fog blanketing the freeway, in an image that infallibly called to mind for me the close of Auden's "September 1, 1939." We must love one another or die. Amen.

Shirley Jackson, _The Haunting of Hill House_

AN APPROPRIATELY ODD kind of convergence led me to this.

First, my mother, who died a little over twenty years ago, really loved Shirley Jackson. I never read any, though, save that middle school standby "The Lottery"--just wasn't that curious.  Still, when we packed up the paperbacks at my parents' house a year ago, most of them to return to the Planned Parenthood booksale from whence years ago they had come, I set aside We Have Always Lived in a Castle, thinking it might be a way of keeping up ties with Mom, in a way. (I still haven't read that one, though.)

Second, this past semester I supervised an independent study on the Gothic--Walpole, Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and so on up to Dracula--not because I know a lot about the Gothic, but just because I was willing to help the three Gothic-hungry students out. Their enthusiasm made an impression on me. I'm still not all that fond of the Gothic, but I did have a chance to see what its devotees find exciting about it.

Third: a few weeks ago we were visiting Elder Daughter in her new home in Tennessee. Wherever we go, I insist on visiting the local bookstores, which in this case took us to a large used book store called McKay's. Browsing the fiction shelves, my eye fell on this. Things seemed to click into place. Okay, I thought, this is the right time to read this.

I started that afternoon, and finished a couple of days later--obviously, it worked for me.

For one thing, Jackson's prose is really good--which cannot be said of the prose of Radcliffe, Lewis, Charles Maturin, Bram Stoker, or even Mary Shelley or Poe, if you ask me, however inventive their imaginations are. Jackson's writing is lean, undecorated, its music subtle.

For another, the book passes the Bechdel test, thanks to the relationship between Eleanor (our point-of-view character) and Theodora.  Theodora's resources and strategies for attracting and holding male attention are multiple and effective, Eleanor's few and feeble, but the rivalry one expects to develop out of this discrepancy never quite materializes as they find each other somewhat more interesting than the available male company.

Finally, like my other favorites in this vein (James's Turn of the Screw and Blake Butler's There Is No Year), The Haunting of the Hill House never does explain what the hell is going on, what the source of the various noises and disturbances and psychic disintegrations is. Explanations, I find, always disappoint. Puzzles are more interesting than solutions. We never do learn what is haunting Hill House, and that's just as it is should be.

Paisley Rekdal, _Animal Eye_

FUNNY THING, GIVEN Paisley Rekdal's age and background, but as I read this book I kept thinking of Seamus Heaney.

Consider the opening of "Ballard Locks":

Air-struck, wound-gilled, ladder
      upon ladder of them thrashing
through froth, herds of us climb
     the cement stair to watch
this annual plunge back to dying, spawn;
     so much twisted light
the whole tank seethes in a welter of bubbles: [...]

Note the virtuoso command of syntax, the compound-adjectives, the scrutiny of wildlife--the wildlife in Animal Eye is often so turbulent and sharp-toothed as to be more that of Ted Hughes than that of Heaney, but nevertheless we're out there where the plants and animals are, as Heaney so often was.

Something about the play of the consonants puts me in mind of Heaney, too, in the above lines or here:

[...] like a spray of feathers from the bird
that has begun feasting now on the apples
in a corner of the orchard. Its dark head darts
into the branches for the fruit before the bird rises
again, flies off, its wings shuddering their streaks of blue
that fade into the darkness.

As in Heaney, we hear the rhythm of that old accentual-syllabic music:

[...] otherwise how would the green
     or red or blue body fly,
how hover like the compass point
     over the hyssop's

sweet stamens?

That's from "Dragonfly," which you ought to find just so that you can read it aloud.

Sometimes I thought, "this is darker than Heaney," but Heaney could get dark, as in "Punishment," with its fatal triangle of young adulteress, murderous crowd, and poet-observer-voyeur, its mobile identifications; and oddly enough, one of the more striking poems here, "Yes," has its own triangle, its own take on adultery and punishment, its own mobile points of view.

Of the two long poems here, "Wax" seems, in its conjunction of art and illness, more Mark Doty circa My Alexandria than Heaney, but the versatile and inventive modernization of terza rima and honest self-appraisal of "Easter in Lisbon" took me right back to Station Island.

I re-read some Heaney when he died a while back, but I don't know that I have looked at him again since. But I should.  This whole book somehow served to remind me vividly how much I loved his work. Probably not at all what Rekdal had in mind, but I feel as though she has done me an important favor.