What, Me Worry?

Renata Adler's Speedboat is just over 36 years old. Well, if it was published in 1976, then it's 37 years old, so it's 37 years old, not 36 years old. Let's just call it 36 years old plus one year.

People who turn 36 seem to feel fucked up about the fact that they're turning 36. I've seen this more than once. Twice, in fact. So it's not a trend, but it makes a lot of sense to me, so that's good enough. I'm sure it has something to do with the idea that you're closing the gap with 40, which should be anxiety producing except that it's really not nowadays. I mean, maybe it is if you're a virgin or some other Judd Apatow plot — or maybe just Judd Apatow in general. Whatever. Point being, if you spend too much time letting Judd Apatow invade your mental space, you might feel fucked up about turning 40.

Which is why 36 is so scary to people. They worry about their prospects. They change careers. They get married. They stop being married. They cut their hair. They grow their hair. They freak out. In short, they get screwy and emo and start to "reevaluate" things.

The same is not true for books, but while reading Speedboat, I considered the symmetry and subsequently avoided the incoherence of thinking of a book turning 36 (plus one).

Speedboat is not a long book — only 170 pages — but it takes a long time to sift through. One, its fragmentary conceit requires more attention than you're used to giving a book — the fragments are memories, anecdotes, random thoughts. Sometimes it sounds like the character is holding court at a bar. Sometimes it sounds like she's talking to a therapist. Sometimes it sounds like she's being deposed for an affidavit. I think what it's meant to do is — wait, I should back up now.

So such as it is, there is a character in Speedboat named Jennifer Fain. She is a reporter for maybe a tabloid or something in New York City. She has a boyfriend or two — I think — the names sort of run together. You get the sense she comes from a privileged background. She has no attachments in the world, so she's able to travel and go out to dinner and attend cocktail parties and take tennis lessons — basically a typical urban existence. She's sort of neurotic about shit.

OK, back to the previous paragraph: the fragmentary conceit mirrors her tabloid job — you imagine the character constantly hearing snippets of details along the way and recording them, and a neurotic lets all the shit jumble together. And her personal life is sort of logged and recorded with the same kind of clinical approach.

At the same time it's sort of a "New York" kind of book, in the sense of cramming in all this humanity into one's mental space; I can see how such an environment might crowd out other parts of your world. I don't get the sense a lot of people have that problem, even people in New York, but it's an impression of urban life, so there's that.

And ultimately the fragmentary conceit is the cadence of the neurotic — skipping around, glomming onto fleeting thoughts, imbuing thoughts with extra weight. It's interesting in that respect.

These were my impressions while reading Speedboat. I don't know if Guy Trebay would validate these impressions because I didn't read the afterword, though I do really appreciate the fact that it was an afterword and not a foreword, so I wouldn't be tempted to read anything in advance. I don't like to read commentary beforehand. It's not that I feel like I'm cheating. It's more that I'm stubborn.

Also, those last couple of sentences, and probably most of the sentences and paragraphs herein, consciously ape the way she constructs these snippets of story. There's a cadence to it. It's got a flat, affectless tone (like a news article). At the same time, it's somehow super emo; world weariness plus hopelessness multiplied by koans. And there are no exclamation points. Just a few words at the end of a paragraph. They kind of thump on the floor toward the end, just like this.

And on and on. It's kind of addictive to write like this, and I need to stop myself or I'll be stuck in an eddy of writing this way. Forever, perhaps. It's tough to stop. I will excerpt a short passage from the book, to illustrate what I'm talking about, and also to get out of my own head space:

Friends kept wandering into Mattie's apartment to talk about legal matters. Everyone was drinking beer. I drank beer. I tried to look as though I knew what I was doing there. "Are you here for an interview," Mattie finally said, "or are you going to sit there like death on a soda cracker?" We became friends, of course.

While reading Speedboat I began to wonder whether Seinfeld was a watershed moment in that it finally allowed people to indulge their true neurotic selves. You know: double dipping, festivus, SHRINKAGE! It went on and on and on — and sometime in the early 1990s we all became George Costanza, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. And the world became insufferable.

Jen Fain existed in a pre-Seinfeld world, so instead of goofing about whether Jim is spongeworthy, she . . . well, you see where this is going.

I don't know if Adler totally telegraphs the ending, but in the recesses of my wandering mind — and it's easy for your mind to wander as you read Speedboat — I feel like it sort of occurred to me that it might be going in that direction, and it wasn't surprising when it did go there. Well, I guess all that abortion doctor stuff was a big clue, but — ironically — there's nothing like a baby to get you to chill the fuck out and focus a little.

(Interesting — out of curiosity I just Wikipedia'ed Adler because I had a hunch from the ending that she never had a kid — I was half right: her kid was born ten years later. Someone should study writers who lob baby bombs in stories; for childless ones, merely being pregnant is the game changer in a story; once you actually have a kid you start to realize that there's a very long grace period before "things have to change" — maybe up to two years! This doesn't apply if you're on drugs, however.)

There's something interesting about the fragmentary conceit — the overwhelming sense is that they read like scraps of ideas for scenes or characters. They're totally incoherent otherwise. I know each of the seven parts are thematically related, or at least they seem that way, or that they should be, but honestly, it feels like an onslaught of sketches. And yet it's interesting because I think every writer on the planet probably — probably — writes this way; the germs of ideas are sketches and snippets and not fully formed and dripping with emotion and laden thick with meaning. But they're not stories. And so 96 percent of them get shunted aside or lost or edited out. So when I say that the conceit is "interesting," I'm not just being lazy — it really is interesting to get lost in these snippets. It's like a giant ball pit of neuroses. Fun. But also kind of draining, and a lot of times you're wondering where the story is going, and then it really doesn't go anywhere, because you can't really construct a coherent story this way. So while it's interesting . . . it's just kind of "interesting."

I think I will read Guy Trebay's afterword now.

[A few minutes pass . . .]

OK, I read Guy Trebay's afterword. I forgot about the 1970s thing — we talked about that in book club, how the tone evokes the hopelessness of the decade (or what you hear about it at least). Twitter isn't the right comparison: yes, tweets are fragmentary and "short" but it's a facile comparison. I don't see Adler as a DJ. I don't think DJs are that interesting. I mean, they're "interesting," but . . . I suppose you could say that Speedboat anticipates the fragmentary, undisciplined blockquote culture of blogs (or whatever you want to call them), but "blog" is such an ugly word, and why use an ugly word like that when you could call it "sharply observed miniatures rendered aslant" (SOMRA)? But why go there? Why be neurotic about what it all means 36 years later (plus one)? What if it's not like a DJ, or a Tweet, or anything else from the mid- to late-2000s? Because then it's just a period piece, and the last thing someone 36 years old (plus one) wants to hear is that he or she is a period piece.

Me Like Black; Like Me, Black!

As a title, Black Like Me is pretty over the top. Yes, I know it's from a Langston Hughes poem, but if you read the poem, I think it's kind of saying something different but, yes, "black like me" — funny — ha ha — I get it — but seriously, it's kind of a facile reference. Sort of like the title of this post.

So yeah, you know Black Like Me — it's that book where the white guy loads up on pills and sunlamps to make himself look African American — or "black," as they said in 1959, which facilitates flourishes of symmetry such as "I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won't rub off." (You can see pictures here.) You might think the experiment sounds strange and slightly offensive, and it is. But there's also a reason it had an impact and continues to be read.

I don't know if John Howard Griffin is actually single-handedly responsible for the first-person gonzo style of writing that seemed to get so much traction in the post-9/11 era, but clearly all that stuff owes a huge debt to him. Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man is basically exactly the same thing, though much more in depth and perhaps a little less defensible (if I recall correctly, the guys she interacts with don't really deserve to be misled, though the white racists in Griffin's books are fuckers).

On the one hand, there's something slightly sociopathic about the undercover genre and probably undercover work in general. Deriving at the truth of something by faking out and lying to people is ironic at best, and mostly ethically murky. I guess it just goes to show that you can explain away a lot of shit by attributing it to a writing project of some sort.

Black Like Me works best when Howard's punking racists. Where it gets weird — unaccountably bizarre — is when he begins fool black people. There's a point in his second day — the second day! — "as a black man" where he's asked his opinion about "the problem," and he actually opines that the community's biggest obstacle is "lack of unity." Like I said, weird.

But in terms of helping contemporary whites understand what it was like to live in a segregated society, Black Like Me seems important. In terms of recording the experience of segregation for posterity, Black Like Me is important. And yet, you just kind of cringe at points. And then at some point you're kind of like, Dude, blackface? Really?

And I can't believe people at the time weren't creeped out by the whole enterprise. Apparently Stokely Carmichael called Black Like Me "an excellent book — for whites." And later on, Eddie Murphy's "White Like Me" was a pitch-perfect sendup of the endeavor.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm undercutting the bravery in painting yourself black in 1959 and traveling through some mean parts of the south, but it is interesting how much mileage Griffin got from the experiment. According to the book, he was only darkly pigmented from November 7 to December 14 — so like five weeks total. Which is to say, this was no No Impact Man. And while Griffin traveled through some mean, nasty parts of the south, if you pay attention, it didn't seem like he was in those really fucked up places all that much — a lot of time he seems to be in New Orleans, then there was a harrowing bus ride to Mississippi — but he's quickly rescued by a friend who he stays with in safety (speaking of which, the gallows humor moments he shares with this friend is kind of uncomfortable). There are a bunch of bus rides around Mississippi, then several days in Mobile and up to Montgomery (where he takes a bit of a break and "passes" back into white society for a day or two) before heading to a Trappist monastery (!) in Georgia and then some days in Atlanta before going back to New Orleans. Again, I'm not saying what he did wasn't intense and crazy and . . . "Yikes!" And like I said, translating the experience of segregation for a non-black audience is powerful and important. But it is surprising how much followed from just six weeks. It makes those "year of . . ." writers seem like Edward Gibbon or something.

To that point, the book is 147 pages of the experiment itself, then another 47 pages of the subsequent reaction — although he and his family had to move out of their Texas town, there was also a lot of getting flown to New York and interviewed. That last part felt self-congratulatory.

And let's be real, it's easy to read a line like "My first afternoon as a Negro was one of dragging hours and a certain contentment" and dismiss the whole thing out of hand. But despite all that I kept thinking how great it'd be to do the same thing and test Ray Kelly's Stop and Frisk policy. Perhaps this will be moot soon enough, but if anyone wants to load up on Methoxsalen, it'd be interesting to see what happens. Again, it's about punking the bad guys (or the bad policy).

Ultimately, Griffin comes across as so gentle and earnest that it's hard to get too worked up about the book's obvious ridiculousness. Sometimes I kept thinking about the big reveal in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I am going to ruin for you because it's a stupid fucking piece of shit, where you find out that the boy's mother has figured out what the boy is doing and contacts in advance all the, uh, Blacks he has looked up and is planning to visit, just to sort of . . . actually, I don't know, why she did that. Anyway, I imagined that Griffin's wife was able to let all the towns know in advance that her guileless painted husband was headed their way. Impossible, I know, but I'm sure Jonathan Safran Foer could work with this detail . . .

Political Assassination For Dummies And Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction, At Least Until An Editor Can Wrap Up The Loose Ends

It was my turn to pick a book for book club, which, truth be told, is not something I look forward to. Don't get me wrong, I can usually rise to the occasion, but the more my already narrow world has been restricted to poop diapers and copy editing (not always terrible) travel writing, the fewer ideas I have in general. I'm not sure, for example, that the entire group wants to read Sheryl Sandberg's new treatise, no matter how cute it is (or that I think that it is) that when I tell Master not to "lean in" to the dirty pail I say, "Quit it, Sandberg!"

If you dislike the idea of book clubs, mostly because you don't want to be saddled with either having to read The Kite Runner or feeling guilty about not having read The Kite Runner, then our system might be something to keep in mind: Whichever member it is who has to pick that month is responsible for three choices, which the attending members hash out and chew over before deciding what the next pick will ultimately be. It's consensus building, something Walt Whitman might write a poem about, or even "a fucking poem about," if you're feeling exuberant. (Of course you can game the system: the one month I really wanted to read Mötley Crüe's excellent The Dirt I also meekly offered Ross Douthat's Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class and, yes, Khaled Hossein's The Kite Runner. Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! It was (perhaps literally) a no-brainer.)

Over time we've seen that the three-pick semi-final becomes an incentive to amp up your game, as it were, and not only make excellent choices but also come up with an excellent theme for each of the excellent choices. This doesn't sound as Type A as you'd assume — for me it tends to focus my hunt for a book, and not always at the expense of shoehorning something into a theme.

This past month I was working around Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, which was one of Jen's holiday gifts to me, a book that I'm pretty sure she got for me because she takes me for some sniveling yellowbelly cocksucker who never fought in a war. And I guess because it's supposed to be good.

But it did get me thinking: there seem to be two places in particular where "people" or "audiences" place a special premium on personal experience — one is politics and the other is novels. In the case of the former, it makes sense: you can't possibly understand what it means to have lobbyists write legislation for you if you haven't run your own company, served in active duty or operated on people; that much is clear. With writing, however, it just seems facile — and I think literally ironic, or at least literally absurd: you can't be trusted to weave a fictional tale if you haven't actually lived what you're making up.

By way of a huge digression, maybe what we really want is for people to "Irish things up" a little, or even a lot, with their storytelling, and maybe "fictionalized" or "thinly veiled fiction" is the way to give cover to that. I don't totally understand how we square getting miffed at David Sedaris while gleefully trying to discern which parts of The Devil Wears Prada are real.

At any rate, and by way of a hugely disingenuous blanket generalization, what seems to be kind of lacking these days are stories that are fully sourced from one's own imagination — as opposed to a summer job or internship, ex-girlfriend or traumatic family secret. Because what I suspect is going on is that it's not "interesting" enough to simply create a story about, say, a high schooler shooting up a school — you need to have actually birthed that child in order to create a fictionalized account about him. And what does that say about us, as a society, when we start encouraging our youth to actualize latent psychopathic tendencies? It looks pretty bad, I'll tell you that much — bad enough to make the founding fathers rethink much of the Bill of Rights, probably.

Anyway, as I was saying, I got caught up in this idea. Not necessarily of parlaying your own experience as currency to get a book published but rather the obsession in all of us for "authenticity," whether it's a noodle shop, artisan or even an author telling what is presumably a made-up story.

If an author can combine some kind of authentic experience with a no-go zone — whether its a battlefield, drug-infested neighborhood, bad school, kitchen nightmare, rape house or whatever — then they've got even more on the rest of us.

Which isn't to get on Kevin Powers — not at all. Although I still haven't read the book, I'm sure it's going to be good. What I'm really after is this position we're in where we — "we" — don't trust experiences or expressions that aren't somehow "authentic" — whether it's "we" the book industry or "we" meaning literally "us," I'm assuming it's probably our own goddamn fault (but clearly this is an area that needs further research, or beer). I guess if I sat here long enough I'm sure I could figure out a way to blame Anthony Bourdain somehow.

Which is to say, my theme began as one-upmanship. Or something like that. So then I got to thinking about other no-go zones: The drug world popped into mind, which made me think about the border states of Mexico, where it seems about fifty times more dangerous than Iraq. I was curious about whether there was good literary fiction about the drug cartels or something like that. There is apparently a good non-fiction book about the drug cartels, but we've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, so I wanted a fiction book. I settled on The Plaza by Guillermo Paxton, which I was also interested in because it was published by a small and interesting sounding independent publisher. It's funny, but I'm not worried about the "quality" of the writing in a small press release (or even something self-released) — we ended up not reading The Plaza, so I don't actually know about how well it's written, but part of me thought that it can't be worse than a lot of new fiction we'd read, which, despite being prominently featured on NPR and adapted into HBO series or whatever, were actually infantilizing twee pieces of shit.

So then I thought about the theme some more and realized that, hey, I know like not at all what it's like to be a terrorist, so is there any first-person fiction from the point of view of a terrorist? And after reading no fewer than three Times pieces on this very topic (1, 2 and 3) I learned that it turns out that there really isn't!

I should back up a second: There is literary fiction about terrorism from the first-person point of view of the terrorist except that it was written by John Updike when he was well into his 80s and the great author supposedly used Islam for Dummies for background. I mean, I guess that's what I'm talking about, but I'm intrigued like not at all about that book.

But that's where Joseph Conrad comes in. Already a big fan of his highly fluid and accessible prose from such classics as Heart of Darkness and . . . uh, Heart of Darkness, which, if my math is correct, I've spent more of my life having read than not having read, I had no idea that he wrote about terrorism, too (in fact, he did!). And not only that, but Conrad's The Secret Agent was Ted Kaczynski's favorite book.

It turns out that The Secret Agent is also apparently a little hokey, with characters that verge on caricatures, so between the two we settled on Under Western Eyes. It's not a first-person account, but it does get you in the head of a terrorist at least somewhat, without a Dummies book.

(And to circle back to something I mentioned before, when I say "we," I'm not being majestically plural — literally, "we" at book club were hashing out what to read.)

All of the above is to say that Under Western Eyes is pretty great.

It seems like it should be hard to spoil the ending of something written over 100 years ago, but I will do just that in this paragraph. Eyes is set in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The story begins in St. Petersburg with an assassination. Razumov, the main character, is surprised to find that the assassin, a fellow student, has come to him for help to escape, assuming that Razumov's allegiances were similar. In a tyrannical and paranoid regime, the assassin's mere presence in Razumov's room has screwed up things permanently for Razumov — they presume more guilt by association, unlike, say, in 24. Razumov decides to turn in the assassin. The assassin is summarily executed by morning. The next part of the book switches to Geneva, where the assassin's mother and sister have moved to. Once the news comes out, the two are treated as, er, royalty among the dissident diaspora. Meanwhile, the two have always suspected that something went wrong and that there was more to the story — their son and brother was idealistic but not suicidal. Razumov appears in Geneva and of course the sister wants to meet her brother's closest confidant. It becomes clear that Razumov has been recruited, seemingly mostly against his will, to spy on behalf of Russia, so as a secret agent, Razumov is really in Geneva to ingratiate himself with the dissidents. Overtired and ornery, he is actually a terrible spy . . . it goes on from there . . . he does eventually connect with the assassin's sister . . . suffice it to say, the ending does not turn out well.

Eyes may be obvious, or maybe you'll find yourself waiting to see revealed what you assume will eventually happen, but it is still a great, tight book. And this is true even in spite of the heavy, laden imagery and allegory — all of which are accoutrements that distract only slightly from the story (as for the allegory, sure — granted, political turmoil affects everyone, regardless of their beliefs or how much they would like to avoid it). Writing-wise, Conrad certainly never makes it easy. Is his grammar precise and correct? Yes, but I'll never understand why there has to be so much of it. Take the first line of the book — it's no best-of-times-worst-of-times kind of opening line. Instead you struggle with wrapping your head around this:

To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor — Kirylo Sidorovitch — Razumov.

Which you can also write as: "To begin with, I can't make up a character like Razumov." But that's just Joe Conrad for you: Looking back, it's not that that line is particularly complicated but rather reading line after line after line like that has a cumulative effect of making you zone out. I remember my high school English teacher calling Heart of Darkness "impressionistic," which I think is a euphemism for something along the lines of what you're left with when you zone out while you read long stretches of noun-age and passive voice — an "impression" of what the fuck is going on.

Oh, as for the title and the general premise that this complicated country is inaccessible to "western" thought — we get it! I can't tell you how many times Conrad's narrator repeats this. I will acknowledge — and this is where I find the book to be awesome — that I think (or at least try to make a case for the idea that) Conrad is purposely writing this way, in this clunky style, for this character in particular precisely because this character is a disengaged observer. The other actors in the book also seem to speak more directly, or are more men and women of action. It's a smart and seemingly self-aware touch. At book club Alexis mentioned that her impression is that where Heart and Eyes are slog-like — because both subjects are heavy slogs — Joe's maritime books are more "energetic." I'm happy to take her word for it.

Also, Razumov is a great character. As the assassin's supposed friend, he's immediately welcomed by the Geneva revolutionaries. And even though his specific mission is to spy on these guys, he couldn't be any less cooperative and bitchy and sarcastic around them. And, like the pick-up artists in that Neil Strauss book, we learn that negging is the best approach — the more sarcastic Razumov is, the more he seems to be accepted — or at least no one really cares how much of a jerk he is. It's a great psychological touch on Conrad's part.

Under Western Eyes works in a way that a modern book about terrorism can't because Conrad finds the perfect scenario for the story and you are pulled into "understanding" both sides. The assassin's act also took the lives of innocent people, so Razumov's actions (I think) come off as justified. At the same time, the tyranny of the Russian system seems attack worthy, so you feel sympathetic to the revolutionaries Razumov is sent to infiltrate. Meanwhile, no one is particularly "good" or blameless. Conrad's author note calls this "impartial," but I think it's more deft than that — "impartial" is what you'd call a wire report or a debate commission or a jury: Conrad's characters rise to a higher level than simple "impartiality."

At some point, as many people writing in the Times in fact did after 9/11, you might choose to use Eyes as a, er, lens to view storytelling about modern terrorism. And no matter how "sympathetic" writers make terrorists, I think it's going to continue to be an uphill climb. A few more years of drone strikes might change the equation, of course, but I don't know how relatable 72 virgins in heaven will ever seem to a western reader. Which is to say, modern terrorists are using way too much tuna (although after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can anything be construed as too much tuna?). (If you're wondering what was up with that last parenthetical, I can double down: Dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations may have been absolutely necessary to save 1 million U.S. lives, but it came at the expense of somewhere around 200,000 Japanese lives; the whole calculus seems pretty brutal, and deserves more awe or even shock than the hushed tones of American history books tend to give the event — or at least my memory thereof.)

Modern-wise, Homeland I think comes the closest to putting the viewer/reader into the head of a terrorist, but without giving much away, it doesn't go far enough. I would love to see Eyes adapted for today: At points during the book you might find yourself substituting one setting for another and the effect is supertight and chilling (even "dazzling", whatever that means).