Welcome To The Monkey House

Welcome To The Monkey House

By Kurt Vonnegut

Interesting. I just finished Welcome to the Monkey House. Two books ago I read Ape House. This is all part of my challenge to read books that refer to primates (other than humans) in some way. Next up: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It's all opposable thumbs, all the time here at My Life in Books!

OK.... anyway...

Sitting down with a Kurt Vonnegut book is like easing back into your favorite chair to watch your favorite movie while eating your favorite snack food. After months of treading new ground, it's nice to sit back with something familiar. Something unsurprising and solid. Kurt Vonnegut (along with Tom Robbins and Salman Rushdie) are my Rushmore. They are my chicken soup for the reader's soul. They are my safety reads. Goto novels when I feel like I need a refresher on where I came from. I love to revisit these guys and I do so often.

All this revisitation is a bit of a Catch-22, though, because at last count I only have three more novels left before I have read Kurt Vonnegut's entire bibliography. With Robbins, it's one, with Rushdie, it's two. For as much as I read, I have never finished an author's entire career's work (well... except Harper Lee). And while I will be left with collections of short fiction, essays and opinions for all three authors once I complete their bibliographies, as Welcome to the Monkey House shows, this shall be problematic.

Welcome to the Monkey House is one such collection of Vonnegut's early short fiction that I can only assume was published in what he refers to in Breakfast of Champions as "beaver magazines"(actually, after a cursory look on the Wikipedia entry for the collection, most of these stories were first published in reputable sources such as Collier's, Ladies Home Journal and Esquire, but let's not mess with a good story). The stories are predominantly science fiction, although some decidedly not. As with most collections of short stories, the content of Welcome to the Monkey House is uneven. Granted it's the sort of uneven work created by Kurt Vonnegut, which means it's good. But it's still uneven.

Personally, I enjoy Kurt Vonnegut's more traditional science fiction over anything else. Science fiction was the genre in which Vonnegut rarely failed. This turned out to be true on this collection as well. I most enjoyed a story entitled "The Manned Missiles" (1955) in which the father of the first Soviet man in space writes a heartfelt letter to the father of the first American man in space. Their boys' missions, which culminated in each of them dying in space due to the aggression of their respective nations, culminates in a detente between America and the Soviet Union and hints at the end of the Cold War. The story has both heart and social relevance (at least on the date of publication). Furthermore, this story has relevance considering its optimistic view of the future. Many Vonnegut critics have accused him of being overly pessimistic.

The title story, "Welcome to the Monkey House" (which, incidentally is the only story in this collection actually published in what might be construed as a beaver magazine... Playboy) is the centerpiece of the entire collection. It explores the subject of sexuality and overpopulation. In an effort to de-populate the planet people have willingly been robbed of their sexual urges. Furthermore, people are encouraged to visit government sponsored suicide clinics where they are eased off this mortal coil by suggestively clad virgins. When she encounters a Billy the Poet, a man who has not ascribed to the new system, she is shown the nature of this life, which she deems "pointless."The story is rife with sexual and moral tension and is perhaps one of the best stories of Vonnegut's career.

In another excellent story Vonnegut lays out a story about Thomas Edison and his dog that may or may not be a lie to get away from an annoying small town story-teller. In another Vonnegut elaborates on one woman's pathological obsession with home renovation. In yet another he tells the story of the first computer to express human emotions and how it falls in love with a woman.

But there are a few stinkers in the mix here (and no Kilgore Trout anywhere in sight). Like the rockets on the early space program, some of these stories just never seem to get off the ground. They all have that signature Vonnegut style but just don't seem to get anywhere. As one would expect from a collection of an author's early work, the stories read like a young writer trying to find his voice. As a devout reader of Kurt Vonnegut, it was a pleasure to read the trajectory of his young writing and see the origins of the more mature writer that would emerge in the ensuing years. In that sense Welcome to the Monkey House is just as much a piece of literary history as it is a collection of short fiction.

But if you are new to Kurt Vonnegut, I would recommend you pass on this one for the time being and start somewhere more conventional: Breakfast of Champions or Slaughterhouse-Five. As for me, I'm coming full circle. It's just about time I begin my way through Kurt Vonnegut's titles for the second time.

So it goes...

The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides

By Jeffery Eugenides

Before I get into this, I have a recommendation to make for anyone thinking about reading this novel. Do not, under any circumstances, read this book while feeling sad. Don't read it if you feel depressed, down, off, low or even slightly unhappy. And, for the love of God, do not read this book if it has been raining consistently in your vicinity for more than a week (in my case, three weeks). I'm not the sort to suffer from depression (mild or sever) but this book put me in a serious funk.

OK, on with the show...

The Virgin Suicides is the 1993 debut novel by Jeffery Eugenides. It is a book I have been meaning to read for over a decade but circumstances have conspired against me all that time (conspiracies include: forget about the book when I'm in the bookstore, bookstore doesn't have the book, living too far away from bookstore, book is obscenely expensive and I refuse to buy it). After reading and reviewing Eugenides more recent novel Middlesex last year, I decided that enough was enough, ordered it on my Kindle and finally sat down and read it. So to say that this book was built up in my mind is an understatement. There was literally a decade of anticipation burbling under the surface as I delved into this one.

Without going into too much detail, the story is about five sisters who, in the course of a year, each commit suicide. It charts the build-up and execution (no pun intended) of the first suicide and the slow, painful descent of the Lisbon family in the wake of tragedy. It also follows the trajectory of the neighborhood who don't seem to have the emotional capacity to deal with the disintegration of a member group in the community. The novel itself seems often reads like a community coping mechanism, albeit too late. In a broader sense, The Virgin Suicides encapsulates the social and emotional isolation of suburban America. Heady issues for a debut novel, Mr. Eugenides!

Eugenides employs the seldom utilized first person plural narrative, which took some getting used to. The narrator, as far as the reader can tell is a boy within a very large social circle living in the same community (although nameless, clues in the narrative suggest that the community is somewhere in suburban Detroit circa the mid 1970s) who speaks for everyone in his social circle from a point several years after the suicides. The narrative reads like a formal introduction (via collection of evidence and interviews) for some sort of investigation (or perhaps memorial) into the suicides, but the reasons for the formality remain unclear to the very end. It had the effect of reading a modern myth narrated by a Greek chorus.

Once I settled into the narrative style, I decided I liked it for several reasons. The first person plural encapsulates the thoughts, memories and opinions of a large group of people in the community and, therefore creates a semi-omniscient narrator. We experience the story through the eyes of the entire community, which gives the feeling of an urban legend (myth) come true. A lot of the details in the book are gained by heresy and conjecture only adding to the obvious distortion of the truth throughout the novel. Many of the "facts" contradict and there is often a measure of dissent among the interviewees on specific details. All this makes The Virgin Suicides a pleasure to read for those who love narrative nuance.

But the narrative style works very well on a second level. Despite the semi-omniscience of the community, it never penetrates into the actual thoughts, memories and opinions of the Lisbon girls, which is the crux of the story, after all. The narrative style builds a metaphorical wall around the girls (to go with the literal one that is their house and parents). This distance from the subjects places them firmly on a pedestal in the mind of the narrator and, in turn, the mind of the readers. The girls are literally and figuratively out of reach. They are completely intangible and, therefore, lapse into the realm of legend in the minds of the local boys. The girls achieve a distant, almost ephemeral quality in the novel. They are already ghosts at the beginning of the novel and only seem to drift farther from reality as the story progresses. These girls exist only in myth and the motives of the narrator suggest myth making.

Surely, if the narrator had gained more access to the girls while they had been alive, they would have been more human. There are glimpses of their humanity in the book but the narrator seems to miss willfully miss them in order to preserve the girls mythical status. But one gets the impression that the narrator has no intention of humanizing these girls. The Lisbon girls have infected the boys in this community so thoroughly that they will never full recover from what transpired and their particular coping mechanism is to mythologize rather than humanize.

On a second level, this novel deconstructs the deep isolation of the post-World War II North American suburban experience. Eugenides does a spectacular job with setting (as he did in Middlesex). He encapsulates the loneliness and tedium of life in these communities. And this story derives from the dichotomous desires of people who want calm and serenity while simultaneously desiring chaos and disorder. This is best represented in the book during the sub-plot involving the on-going community plan to eliminate Dutch Elm disease in the community trees by cutting them all down, reducing the neighborhood to a barren, naked landscape. The plan is both systematic and chaotic, much like the quietly desperate lives of those who live in the suburbs.

Did this book live up to its reputation (a ten year build up)? Absolutely. Eugenides proved (to me) with Middlesex that he is a significant force in the literary community. Going back and reading The Virgin Suicides only confirms that the pedigree was always there. My recommendation is that if you have not yet read this book, do so. It deserves to be recognized as a modern classic. I finished the book the day before writing this and since I insist on writing my blog within a day of completing a book (to keep it fresh as well as to see what sort of spontaneous nonsense comes out of me) this blog post cannot and will not do this novel justice. There is so much to this book and I fear I will need to re-read this book before too long.

I just hope it doesn't rain when I do.

A Long Way Down

A Long Way Down

By: Nick Hornby

I recall reading once that Margaret Atwood loved Mordecai Richler's new novel. She enjoyed it every time he published it. I have struggled to find the source of this quote (therefore the paraphrasing) and I'm not sure if she really said it, but even if I imagined it, it holds a good dollop of truth about Richler, and so many others.

While I love Mordecai Richler, I find myself agreeing with this (alleged) quote. It is a more concise way of verbalizing my theory on Diminishing Returns in Literature. I nicked the idea from the original Law of Diminishing Returns, the economic law that is, and I understand how the economic theory works, basically. My theory is only marginally akin to its economic brethren due to my complete lack of interest in economic theory, so please bear with me.

Essentially, my law of diminishing returns states that an artist (in whatever oeuvre) creates something that awes and inspires his or her audience. It could be their first piece or their fifty-first piece, it doesn't matter. if it is the audience's first exposure to said art, it typically impresses. The audience is then compelled to explore more of the artist's body of work and, while still impressed, each successive piece experienced by the audience impresses slightly less until such time that the audience comes to the realization that the artist will never again give the them the same feeling they got from the first piece they saw.

Another way of explaining it would be to compare it to heroin or cocaine (although having never tried either of these narcotics, I'm working from hearsay). Users frequently say that their very first hit of heroin or cocaine is better than any feeling they have ever experienced and that addiction stems from their eternal pursuit of that same "first time" feeling, which they never get again. While I'm not a junkie, I do understand this concept.

It happens in music (Radiohead), film (The Coen Brothers) and television (The Simpsons). A radiohead virgin listening to any Radiohead album (pick one, any one, really) will immediately love it to bits. They will then like each subsequent album they hear significantly less, not because they are worse, but because they are all essentially the same. My first exposure to Radiohead was The Bends and it has remained my favorite. But this blog is about books and the most obvious literary example I can think of for my diminishing returns theory is Tom Robbins.

The first Tom Robbins novel I ever read was Jitterbug Perfume and I can honestly say that it is one of a small number of books that changed my life. I can't say exactly how, but upon finishing that book I felt like I had come through something and was somehow different, more whole, more in touch. Perhaps imperceptibly, but changed nonetheless. I have two friends who say they had the same experience after finishing Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, respectively. It doesn't matter which Tom Robbins book you read, it just has to be the first one. That will forever be: The One. All others will fail to attain the same status.

I have read virtually everything Robbins has written and each subsequent novel has impressed me less and less. It's not that I read the best one first, it's that they are all essentially the same and, therefore, aren't equipped to hit me as hard as the first one ever did. They aren't bad, they're just not Jitterbug Perfume.

The same can be said of Richard Russo. I read Empire Falls first and each successive novel impressed me less because they were structurally the same. And as much as it pains me to say it, Margaret Atwood (if she did indeed say it) is right about Mordecai Richler. I read Barney's Version first and went backwards from there. Each novel seemed like a variation on Barney. I suspect those that read the Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz or Joshua Then and Now would say the same about Barney's Version. Other authors that fall into this category include Irving Welsh, Ben Elton, Leon Uris and Douglas Adams (sorry).

Well, add Nick Hornby to this list. I loved High Fidelity when I first read it about a decade ago. That book spoke to me, a certifiable music snob, like very few others could. Fever Pitch was pretty good too. Although I don't share Hornby's obsession with English football, I do understand obsession (mine is hockey). About a Boy was fine, How to Be Good was forgettable (in fact I picked up How to Be Good about a month ago and it took me 40 pages to realize I had already read it) and A Long Way Down was painful.

OK, it wasn't painful as such, but it was just sort of the same as all his others. I have nothing against Nick Hornby. He's literary elite, a rock star among writers with nothing to prove. He's found a formula that works for him and he has to tell his stories the best way he can and I respect him for that. Having never written a novel, who am I to say that he's fallen into a rut. It's just that I can't imagine picking up another Hornby book only to fall into another world filled with Hornby's hipper than hip characters.

One might argue that the literary law of diminishing returns is too critical. Perhaps we should just take solace in knowing what you will get from some authors. A literary comfort zone so to speak. But I know what I'm going to get from Kurt Vonnegut and Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth but they never fail to amaze me, book after book after book...

Aw, hell. Perhaps I'm simply as jaded as a Nick Hornby character. I think its time to read some non-fiction. Wash the palette clean.