Eric Simpson's Blog: Marginal Accretion

Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in May, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were 16 years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.

There are some books that are difficult to put down. Ann Beattie's first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, published in 1976, kept my attention for twenty hours or so. The chilly scenes of winter tend to melt appropriately as one grows accustomed to Beattie's characters, who become like familiar friends you don't want to leave behind after the last page.

In some ways, this is a simple novel, but dangles into narrower and more profound themes, a sort of cultural expose that hints on issues as complex as defining gender or exploring the meaning of love. The narration is a bit jagged, which was disorienting in the first few pages, and I'm not sure I always appreciated Beattie's style of inserting images of previously described motifs into the stream-of-consciousness narration through the use of fragmented sentences. But it worked, and here and there it worked quite nicely.

Chilly scenes melted appropriately...Reading it in one sitting...

The strongest element in this novel is the characterization, coupled with the descriptions of daily experience. The protagonist, a twenty-six year old man, is a sort of cynical lover, who loves his womanizing best friend, loves his mother and perhaps even his step-father, and of course loves the woman he can't have. He is sentimental and idealistic at times, projecting Norman Rockwell images of his own desire for personal and familial communion, but he is also bitterly realistic, especially when this involves his own losses and his own mother's gradual loss of sanity. We are brought into his emotional realm in a concrete manner, able to empathize with him as he relates with the various characters who people Beattie's wry and ironic universe.

Another interesting element of Chilly Scenes... for me are the cultural references. Written in 1975, twenty-five years ago (when I was seven years old), the twenty-something baby-boomers in this work have quit drugs, settled down, grown a bit harried by responsibility and skeptical about man/woman relationships, yet still await Bob Dylan's latest, recommend Janis Joplin, wonder what kids on allegedly drug-free campuses do?, and see everyone in the world as possibly a bit crazy, and worthy of pity. The references to various pop musicians and celebrity figures of the time add a certain cultural quality to the novel, while at the same time expose the superficiality of the culture itself, especially in terms of defining love and interpersonal relationships in a meaningful way.

Overall, this novel is an entertaining and excellent read, with well developed characters, an intriguing plot, good descriptions and a lot of humor. It's chief drawback is that it ended too soon.



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Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in June, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were 16 years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.

In recent years my thoughts have leapt back to an analogy often supplied by Stephen King in various interviews, that of the role of the horror writer who pleasantly lures you with seemingly innocuous words into a dark alley in order to turn and scare you witless. He has half of that right, I think.

King certainly possesses the verbal power and literary stamina to capture one's attention, writing in his trademark conversational style, which is filled with references and allusions culled from the collective media consciousness. However, in some of his 90s fiction I'd felt more like he was luring the reader into a dark alley merely to turn, make funny faces, and maybe expose himself; there is an implied gratuitousness that sometimes arises from the conversational style he employs, a gushing forth of words and ideas that approaches lazy sentimental reverie.


First, the bad news...

King's aforementioned streams of excess are often distracting and annoying growths on the text. First, this can be found in his hammering a point to death, rather than subtly making it clear. King has shown himself capable of both kinds of writing, but when the point has to do with the inward thoughts of his characters, and one doesn't necessarily identify with the character, the relentlessness of his making the point begins to create distance, rather than empathy or identification, between reader and character. For instance, we are told pretty straightforwardly that Bobby Garfield in the first section of Hearts in Atlantis, a long story titled Low Men in Yellow Coats, like the novel, Lord of the Flies. We don't gather from his response to it that he likes it and it has made an impact on him, but we are told in no uncertain terms, repeatedly, how much he loves it. King spells it out for us. Over and over again.

Secondly, due perhaps to his phenomenal success, there is a level of subtext in his fiction which includes a kind of editorializing. For instance, again in the first section, he opines, pretty much straight from the narrator (rather than as a theme surfacing from the characters and plot), on his view of what makes good literature. This is just short of a straightforward comment to the narattee, spiced with perhaps King’s own bitter biases. (On that note: Why are some of the characters surnamed after famous literary writers, such as Brautigan and Auster? Is this intentional, I wonder?)

Thirdly, again in Low Men..., King turns the story suddenly into a fantasy, confusingly correlating with his Dark Tower series, which is a little disappointing as it reaches its climactic pique. His devoted fans of the series will no doubt delight in this, but it broaches the unity of the story itself in a disturbing way. There is nothing wrong with fantasy, of course, but here it seemed to smack a bit of the deus ex machina, the god who appears from the sky to save the day at the very last minute (though, admittedly, not all is saved), unnecessarily punting to an entire field of story that lay beyond the margins of the present text.


Characters in Conflict

I'm ambivalent about King's conversational style when it comes to describing his characters. He imbues them with a level of thought that is too obvious, it seems, as those who would be moved by dramatic-film-school motivations, less complex than real people and more like projections of what one might view a stranger’s thoughts to be like. In other words, King's characters often see themselves simplistically and sentimentally, even if they are in despair, and he brings us within such close range to their thoughts and feelings, that each character or persona tends to be defined as seen through the gauze of their own sentimental self-perception. We can observe the fallacy more clearly when King and the reader all realize that his foolish characters, his “bad guys,” are trapped in self-justifications, imprisoned by their desires; but when his "good guys" are portrayed with a like kind of protective zeal, separating the wheat from the chaff becomes more difficult: is this character really like this, or is this just what he thinks he is like?

Reading King, I often feel as though I'm sitting with an older relative, listening as he tells me stories from his idealized past, and the people he describes are idealized too.

Yet, King still presents us with believable characters, middle-class Americans stuffed full of popular culture who know nothing else, a cadre of parochial denizens whose desires for love or for communion or to just be happy are the true virtues, and anything more abstract or difficult is condemned as high-brow arrogance.

And for this reason, because it stimulates an old concept of the past dwelling in my own suburban childhood, I am able to understand the conflicts and desires of the Bobby Garfields and the Carol Gerbers who populate King's slightly altered universe.


Will this close the chapter...?

Hearts in Atlantis is partly both a magnification and a commentary on our culture's most recent media-darling of history, the 60s, and all the familiar themes rise up like steam from the heat: drugs, music, bell-bottoms, Vietnam, protest, talk of peace and talk of love and their representative symbols.

I admit I felt a bit distraught to discover that King had chosen to revel in and glorify a period of time already overly-exploited by the media for the last fifteen to twenty years! This sort of historical self-infatuation of a culture has successfully created a mythos of symbols and values which King further takes advantage of in order to submerge us into the scenery and rhetoric of "Atlantis," e.g. the unit of time and experience many people in the generation preceding mine claim to have "come from," as if it were a place, and not connected by a sequence of minutes and hours and weeks to the place where we are now.

Now for the good news...

Yet, despite the obviousness of King's willingness to push the cultural buttons that appeal not only to aging baby-boomers, but to many of their ideological children as well, King doesn't linger too often in the nostalgia, but creates a dramatic tension through simple conflicts in plot which beautifully symbolize the worn-out cliches in a fresh way.

The second story in the book, Hearts in Atlantis, not only connects thematically to the first story, but illustrates the rhetoric of "values" without denigrating into propaganda. Perhaps the best story in these tightly interwoven episodes, Hearts... totally lacks any appeal to the supernatural or the fantastic. It is a straightforward, moving, true and powerful piece of writing, and I'm sure will make a great film.

Where Low Men... grips the reader, returning us to King's brilliant ability to convey the nuances of childhood, the title story dwells on the struggles of young adulthood, discipline and identity. Moving, though here and there sentimental, King deftly leaves the ground, his pen takes flight from his usual conversational ramble, and in the succeeding three stories, he hovers just above the level of plain talking, sometimes swooning again to his previous gait, but at other times, rocketing in a flurry of inspired verbal ecstasy. There are moments when King, who can write, is just hot, you can feel it. The words and sentences burn through you, yet are delicate and easy on the tongue.

I knew that King must have written some of these paragraphs in a fever when I read a nonsense allusion to one of his old stories, laying oddly on the page for no apparent reason (yet appropriate to the flow): "sometimes they come back." Sometimes the flow comes back, apparently, for King, the groove returns, we are through talking and its time to make love.

These are the moments of good, perhaps even great, writing, but they are fewer, stylistically, than the old gimmicks, i.e., relying on the tension of standard plot conflicts and the element of fantasy/horror to hook you.


Conclusion

Overall, this is one of King's most passionate novels, and it is really about the theme he always returns to...growing up: growing up in the fifties and sixties in affluent, middle-class America with the kinds of values that have no undergirding, the provincial and self-absolutized conventions of his parents...replaced with the self-absolutized values of his generation. Growing up in an evil and decadent world of abuse and violence and loss, whitewashed on t.v., but growing up, and reflecting on what is lost and what is past. For King, the Atlantis that sinks beneath the surface is not only a cultural time of apparent chaos, but Atlantis is also childhood and youth.

That makes this a universally appealing, somewhat flawed, but highly entertaining novel, often moving, which I'd recommend to a friend not willing to read more difficult work.



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Intellectuals by Paul Johnson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in October, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were 16 years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.

Vitriol and venom characterizes the typical style most professional reviewers adopt when approaching the academic work of Paul Johnson. The rhetoric is often hateful and unsober, as can be seen for instance in the Salon review of the book under our inspection here, a writer who claims that Johnson’s thick Modern Times is “awful” and “unreadable”--both sentiments reflecting more the reviewer’s dim ideological bias than the actual, quite readable prose Johnson offers.

In terms of quality of writing itself, Johnson’s Intellectuals makes for entertaining historical reverie. The British author’s intent is to put to test several of the ‘intellectuals’ who exerted cultural and social influence during the Enlightenment period forward to our own time. Johnson writes,

“One of the most marked characteristics of the new secular intellectuals was the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny. How far had they benefited or harmed humanity, these great systems of faith? To what extent had these popes and pastors lived up to their precepts, of purity and truthfulness, of charity and benevolence? The verdicts on both churches and clergy were harsh. Now, after two centuries during which the influence of religion has continued to decline, and secular intellectuals have played an ever-growing role in shaping our attitudes and institutions, it is time to examine their record, both public and personal. In particular, I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself.”

In this endeavor to put the critics of religious morality to the acid test, Johnson begins with Rousseau, highlighting his egoism, sexual perversity (“liked to be spanked” and was a public exhibitionist of his “bottom”), his ironic abandonment of his own children at birth, and his naive political statism.

Moving onward, we find moral failure in the life of the poet Shelly, who emphasized imagination for the transformation of society, but did not possess the imagination to put himself in the place of another on a personal level, and hence was a great debtor and thief, adulterer, and truly without compassion.

Marx, we discover, was purely philosophical and academic, disliking the working proletariat, and an exploiter of others. Johnson fills us in on Tolstoy and Hemingway’s sexual infidelities and emotional abuses of their respective spouses, the shaky foundations of Bertrand Russell, and Sartre’s life of sexual and profligate excess.

In short, much like the Protestant Reformers who preceded and indirectly encouraged the devaluation of all external sources of authority that came later, Johnson engages in a swift, eloquent and admittedly biased ad hominem attack on the newly crowned "popes" and "priests" of the Enlightenment. The premise is that if moral and cultural existence can be rooted within the span of the faculties of the human spirit, rejecting for the most part the claims of revelatory guides, how has this panned out practically in the lives of those who lead the charge? What has humanism, based principally on the autonomous use of reason, to say for itself pragmatically? Has it worked?

Johnson’s point is a good one, though I think his methodology is flawed. Reading Intellectuals is a bit like listening to gossip, which is both unnecessary and necessary. To put the Enlightenment emphasis on the intellect to the test through challenging the moral lives of those thinkers who have had an historical influence is valid; however, Johnson risks a subtle fallacy of concluding that one’s immorality stems directly from the realm of ideas (an "Enlightened" notion itself). He therefore stumbles in the same way he would criticize his intellectuals for stumbling. The ad hominem attack upon intellectuals no more refutes their ideas than their attacks can efficaciously refute the claims of the Christian Church in the West.

Yet, the gossip also serves a necessary function if one adheres to the notion, as I do, that the separation between one’s ideas and one’s life is an unfortunate gap, and that the best moral teachers have brought the two into dynamic union. From that basis, which is more of an Eastern view of moral authority, Johnson’s well-paced diatribe serves a useful purpose.

Johnson’s choice of intellects is also seemingly arbitrary, but perhaps are also reflections of Johnson’s bias, which contorts the thesis of the book in his favor. Why Rousseau and not Voltaire or Turgot? Why Shelly but not Byron or Keats? Why Tolstoy but not Dickens or Turgenev or Dostoevsky?

Lastly, given Johnson’s methodology, it’s interesting that Johnson’s own life has come under scrutiny in the paparazzi press and popular yellow journals, allegations of “immorality” not unlike Rousseau’s which can be found easily enough online. A continuous dynamic of ironic folly makes it’s appearance at this point, beginning, perhaps, with the error of the original Enlightenment thinkers, an error repeated by Johnson, then re-repeated by those who attempt to discredit Johnson for his own immorality. What is the Enlightenment base for judgment? What is Johnson’s base? What is the base of his critics?

No clear lines of distinction between ideas and moral life have been made. Couldn’t it be than even the greatest of intellects might also be found, at one time or another, as a moral failure? Are not most people, at their worst, riddled with both bad ideas as well as moments of hypocrisy? Here I think lies Johnson’s most fatal flaw, his own seeming lack of compassion for those under the lens of his moralizing pronouncements.

On a more superficial level, Intellectuals is a pleasure to read, filled with interesting details from the lives not only of Rousseau, Shelly, Marx, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre and Tolstoy, but there are also chapters dedicated to Ibsen, Brecht, Wilson, Gollancz and Helman. The last summary chapter touches on twentieth century madness, and includes brief discussions of several various contemporary intellects.



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Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind by C.D.B. Bryan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read in 1998 and reviewed in July, 2001. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were 15 years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.

The Scenario
You are driving at night, perhaps alone, or maybe with a friend. In the distant sky you see something strange, a light or a series of lights, moving in odd and bizarre patterns. Maybe your car stalls. Maybe for some reason unknown to you, perhaps overcharged curiousity, you stop the car on your own, and get out.

The next thing you know, you are driving again, and you no longer recall stopping the car, or getting out. Perhaps you have lost time, or seen animals you were not expecting. Maybe this is a little confusing, but you don't think about it much.

In fact, it isn't until much later that the memories come back to you in stark clarity, perhaps after an intense experience, or as a result from hypnosis. You recall not only getting out of the car, but actually floating up into the air, or being approached by beings that are not human. Maybe they are tall, blonde men-like creatures reminiscent of Nordic gods. Or, perhaps they are the small grays with wide oblong voids for eyes (popularized recently in our culture).

Maybe they take you somewhere, experiment on your body with various probes, insert objects into your skin or up your nose, give you information, show you hallucinatory visions, or have you hang out with various other homo sapiens as you wait to board a ship. Maybe you find that you know them, have known them since childhood. Perhaps they tell you that you are pregnant, or that some baby they let you hold is your own; or perhaps you were pregnant, and suddenly you are not. Maybe they leave scars, or take you into oblong shaped crafts, or even steal some of your Christmas cookies. Maybe one of them is wearing a Stetson hat.

The Conference
In June, 1992 a conference met at M.I.T. in order to discuss the widely reported phenomena of abductions as reported by thousands of often reluctant and reticent 'experiencers'. Present at the conference were a wide range of 'experts' who have studied the experiences for years, such as the journalist Linda Moulton Howe, Budd Hopkins, John Mack, Eddie Bullard, and several people who believe they have been victims of abduction by otherwordly, unknown beings. The conference lasted for five days, and author (as well as skeptic) C.D.B Bryan took copious, day by day notes. A newcomer to this field of study, and known for totally unrelated work, Bryan's investigation is fairly objective, and his report of the Conference comes across in style that resembles gonzo journalism.

The first two hundred pages of this volume are taken up with a chronological, day by day report on what happened at the Conference, who spoke and what they said, and Bryan's own personal thoughts and reflections on the subject matter. He takes notes during the lectures (and even admits it when he is bored and his mind strays), and tries to talk to various attendees during coffee breaks, lunch and dinner. He is an honest but open skeptic, and admits it when he thinks that others come across as totally nuts, as well as when he is impressed by the evidence. The style of writing is personal and engaging. At the end of Day Three at the Conference, Mack sits in his motel room, watching the news, which is reporting Dan Quayle's misspelling of the word "potato", when he starts to reflect on what he has heard so far:

"I think about the abductees I have spoken with: that as off-the-wall as the young Massachusetts housewife with her stories of 'Zar' and of groups of worlds working together may have seemed, Pat, the midwestern dentist's wife who wrestled with an alien's arm, semed dead-on. I think of Carol and Alice and their image of trying to locate a parking meter in space; I am moved by their obvious confusion and distress, the terror of Carol's flashback that drove her to seek refuge in a closet....I think of Linda Moulton Howe. She is a respected journalist and documentary filmmaker, and yet she seems to believe in a government cover-up...Linda started up as skeptical as I am about this phenomenon....I realize I don't know what to believe! How does one explain the similarities in the abductee's stories--the consistency of detail, structure, scenario? What would prompt a woman to make up a story about an extraterrestrial creature trying on her high-heeled shoes? How does one explains Budd Hopkins's story of Linda Cortile being 'floated' out of her twelth-floor apartment building before two cars of witnesses who confirm her account? How does one explain John Carpenter's story of the two women abducted in Kansas who, separately and unrehearsed, tell such matching stories?"

The next 249 pages of the book deal with Bryan's post-conference interviews, particularly with Carol and Alice, two women who run a horse farm and have had numerous experiences. This is perhaps an even more stimulating read than the first half of the book, as Bryan attends a few hypnosis sessions, watches to see if those under hypnosis are "lead" to conclusions, and delves into more details of particulars stories of abduction.

Maintaining his skepticism throughout the girth of the book, Bryan nevertheless is impressed by the evidence that something is happening to these people, but he doesn't know what; in most cases, he doesn't doubt the sincerity of belief in the experiences that the experiencers have. Moreover, he offers a few guesses at describing the phenomenon, without coming to any strong or leading conclusions.

Finally, this is likely the best book written to date on the subject--one that doesn't sink to the insobriety of mockery, nor the drunkenness of mindless faith absent of discerning intelligence.



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Flesh And Blood by Michael Cunningham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in June, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were sixteen years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.


Flesh and Blood spans a long period of time in 466 pages--it begins in 1935 and concludes in 2035. Yet, the weight really settles in the middle years, a twenty year period between 1960 and 1980. The publishers claim that this is the story of three generations of Americans, beginning with Constantine, who as a child immigrates to America with his family, and concluding with his grandson. However, the plot more or less settles on the second generation, the children of Constantine and his Italian wife, Mary--Susan, Todd and Zoe--who grow up in the turbulence of the 1960s.

Within that twenty year period, the text concerns itself with the tensions between family members as each child grows into his own identity: Susan, a successful upper-middle class housewife; Todd, an insecure homosexual who struggles for confidence; and Zoe, a loose counterculture waif who bears a black child, then soon discovers she is HIV positive. These tensions originate in the compulsive behavior of Mary, the mother, and the angry violence of Constantine, who seems like a character who is derived straight from Steinbeck's East of Eden. Like those who live in Steinbeck's novel, the character's that populate Cunningham's world each tend to embrace an ideal future, sometimes clasping it, but often feeling alienated from their hopes and from themselves and from each other.

The strength of Cunningham's prose lay not so much in his characters or plot as it does in the exquisite imagery of his prose. A stylistic poetic flow undergirds each sentence, yet without heaviness. Some passages are extremely moving because of the wording itself, the impacted beauty of the language. We come not so much to care for the characters as we do for the aesthetic hot spots, points where paragraphs flow like waterfalls to form crystal and calm metaphorical pools by each segment's conclusion. The same effect is also achieved through use of simple symbols that are emotionally tied to the taut suggestions of desire. The stunning writing of Flesh and Blood, coupled with the emanation of unfulfilled appetites that arise from his characters, redeems the novel from thematic uncertainty and a plot that tends to fragment carelessly.

Hunger and lust is the central movement of Flesh and Blood, the material, bodily need for sustenance that transcends matter, the desire for love, for completion, for holiness. Often, Cunningham reveals this basic human need as his characters stumble through various, strange paths, to fill it, whether through sex, or through stealing inexpensive miscellaneous items, or through financial success, or through finding someone else.

One of the primary ways the characters, especially Will, try to fill spiritual hunger is through sex. There are many descriptive erotic scenes in Flesh and Blood, some of them perhaps too descriptive for my straight-laced tastes. Much of the erotica describes homosexual sex between men, centered around the experiences of Will as he searches for his own identity, and for a lover who will fulfill him. The only time sex between a man and a woman is described, the participants are piquing on LSD, and here, though wonderfully written, this is not erotica, but a poetic segment playing on Zoe's psychological fears and desires. Other non-conventional characters enter stage left, such as an older male friend of Zoe's who is a practicing, mature and worldly-wise transvestite. The presence of this character introduces some segments that bring in an element of strong humor which provides a little relief from the heaviness of the theme, especially when he is introduced to other, more conventional family members.

While the thematic stream of hunger runs through the novel, contrasted with the rootlessness and distance or even confusion each character feels when desire is not met, there are points when it seems to drift and expand, especially towards the second half of the book. One gets the impression at times that some of the characters read the first part, and began to feel sentimental about themselves, and that is enough: they sort of sigh and moan and without explanation become personas that are less than the expectation of the strong first half of the novel has set them up to become. The trauma of the plot, Zoe afflicted with AIDS and slowly dying, tends to eat up the theme with blank abstract sadness. It is true that unfulfilled hunger is sad; but dying of AIDS is not only sad, it is senseless and tragic, and the tragedy of it overwhelms everything else until one feels too emotionally exhausted to even think of being hungry.

The characters are thus, for all their hunger and desires, a bit hollow and forgettable. The theme drifts too often, and ironically, Flesh and Blood tends to feel haunted by characters who become their own memories, rather than filled with the literary substance of Cunningham's rich imagination. The end result is a somewhat mediocre presentation, but one that is imbued with tremendous emotion and value because of its implicit poetry



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I have noticed here on Goodreads that there are members who claim to read hundreds of books a week, which would be several a day.

I'm sorry, but if you make such a claim, either you have the watch from "The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything" by John D. MacDonald, or you are a liar.

It's impossible to read 170 books a week, as some here claim.

I know that Tai Lopez claims he reads one book a day, but I think that is equally unlikely. Skimming a book and gathering its main ideas, plot and themes is not the same thing as reading it. Go back to your garage, Tai. You're a lunatic.

If you are wealthy and have nothing to do, I suppose you could actually manage to read one book a day. I doubt you could keep it up for very long, and you would have to choose mid-length books, which excludes some pretty good ones. But that would come to the sum of seven books a week, give or take, far short of 170.

So what's the deal on these miraculous super-readers? Am I missing something? Shouldn't we actually read a book before marking it as read, or more, rating it?

For my part, no book will be so marked or reviewed without a complete reading. I am not going to give a book five stars because I like the idea of the book but have not actually read it.

For instance, I have only read the first third of The Brother's Karamazov and would rate THAT five stars, but it gets no rating until I finish the book. Likewise, just because I don't like the idea of a book such as, say, Fifty Shades of Gray doesn't mean I get to give it one star. I have to read it first.

I think reviews should be required here before you can rate anything just to prove you read it, but then, there would probably be a lot of attrition.

I am not sure if anyone can see this blog, so comment if you saw it, and if you have an explanation or opinion, please, also comment!

The Eighties: A Bitchen Time To Be a Teenager! by Tom Harvey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Until now, Bret Easton Ellis has been the consummate profiler of the decade of decadence, the 80s, listing the various indulgences and attitudes of its elite members, while Tom Wolfe has produced voluminous works on its ethic of greed. We can relate to these, perhaps, from a distance, as those watching those who have more getting more, but what about regular guys and average, small-town American girls?

With the backdrop of a decade revolting from the chaos of the 20-25 year period collectively referred to as the "sixties", the 80s was a period that witnessed the fall of sports athletes as role models as well as monumental disasters such as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; the era of Ronald Reagan and cabbage patch kids, new wave music and Disneyland cocaine. Against this general backdrop, Tom Harvey grows up.

Unlike the character in Ellis's numerous tomes or a few Wall Street elite in Wolfe, he isn't a drug-addled speed freak, or a rich and spoiled adolescent struggling with impulse buying and ennui. Instead, we are presented with the memoir of a normal guy growing up in a particular period of American history that sat on the precipice between alienated veterans of everything the 60s represented, and the oncoming technology revolution, replete with smart cell phones, the internet, and Presidential Twitter accounts, before you had to stand in front of a live person and use your vocal cords and body language to friend somebody, and when minimum wage was just $3.25 an hour. In other words, a "bitchen time to be a teenager".

Told in a very readable and compelling narrative, Harvey sets the backdrop in the late 70s when he is a child, then moves forward to describe his years in the 80s, beginning with his first year in middle school, through high school and college. There's plenty of opportunity as we follow him for laughter or tears, whichever you might be more inclined toward. I was not sold on, initially, and still feel ambivalent about, some of the historical interventions, the fun facts, or the sometimes seemingly obligatory mentions of events, but these did not detract, for me, from the narrative, and I suppose they are a selling point for many people. (I wonder how well I did with my commas in that previous sentence?)

What strikes me most about Tom Harvey's memoir of growing up in the 80s are three basic elements: his straightforward, pretty much no-nonsense style; his honesty and lack of braggadocio; and his heartfelt vitality and love of life.

The style is linear and to the point, which makes it a comfortable and compelling narrative. You don't feel as though you're trapped in an elderly man's dusty apartment, barely able to breathe, as he meanders pointlessly down memory lane. Harvey has learned the art of brevity, combined with a little reflection, but mostly as appeals to emotion rather than the complicated alleyways of suspicion and over-thinking that I would likely produce if I tried to write a similar memoir.

His honesty is raw and almost like a presence on every page. Honesty is a saving talent when it comes to writing because you always get some kind of bad feeling in the gut that something is wrong when a writer is not telling the truth. Harvey comes across as a basically honest, upfront guy through and through, and it shows on these pages. He doesn't flinch to tell us when he messes up, but he doesn't dwell on his deficiencies either. Why would he,and who would find that interesting, anyway?

Harvey loves life. He rightly loves his own life, his own teenage years, those varied sea changes that mark the course of a life. His love infuses these pages -- for his mother, his brothers, his friends and most strikingly, his good and natural love for himself. Unlike so many contemporary memoirs that hinge upon the conflict of people in psychological peril who finally have a pique experience that transforms them, Harvey's book is imbued with a sense of healthy vitality. He doesn't think back on his 18 year old visage, rocking out with an air guitar, with regret or any bitterness, but speaks of how he loves that guy. This pure feeling is what makes this book worthwhile, and works as a kind of cathartic reliving of a period others of us might not have enjoyed so much. I came away from the book thinking, it's what you bring to the experience that brings it value -- not what external things may do to you. Harvey, even when he's messing up, seems to bring all that he has to his experiences, and that makes a difference. that kind of attention is the very definition of love.



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The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


As one might notice by the date, I read this book more than thirty years ago when I was fourteen years old. I have no plans to re-read it, so offer a brief review now with the caveat that your reviewer is likely untrustworthy.

In short, the book claims to be the true story of a house possessed, which overtakes the personalities of its inhabitants. I recall Stephen King crediting the popularity of the book to "economic unease," postulating at some point that it is a commentary on struggling families, purchasing a house they could not really afford, and the destructive nature of capitalist society. Well, okay. I am sure I did not get any of that from it when I read it.

In fact, I vaguely recall that it scared me. But to my memory it is not a great work of horror, but rather vulgar and exploitative. I have so many books to read before I die, I can't imagine taking the time to read this one again. So if you choose to go there, have at it and take anything I say, due to faulty memory and general prejudices with a grain of salt.



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