The Reading Experience

Scary

It's hard to understand why The Sunday Times considered something like this to be worth publishing as "art criticism":

. . .Rubens wasn't simply an admirer of innocent feminine plumpness. Like a lot of men with a taste for the failed weight-watcher, he had a thick streak of cruelty running through him. His feelings about women were edgy and confused. In Rubens, particularly in his early years, the taste for the multi-pound nude disguises some very unsettling hungers for sex and violence. . .

. . .My own view is that Rubens was a slobberer ahead of his time. His taste for brutally implied sex and the naked humiliation of women speaks to the modern world on subjects for which there is now a huge audience. Look properly at Rubens, and you're looking at a pretty scary guy. . . .

One could certainly find Rubens's paintings to be full of disturbing images of "sex and violence," but why is it necessary to conclude that such images reveal something "unsettling" and "scary" about the artist himself? His art may indeed be "unsettling," but this by no means constitutes evidence of any kind whatever about Rubens's "feelings," his "hungers," or even his "taste" for anything other than his own kind of painterly imagery. The easy association of an artist's work with what the critic wants to think of as his/her "peronality" is asinine, and it is at the very least disappointing that a publication like the Times would encourage such an association.

Several decades worth of art criticism and education (including literary criticism and education) demonstrating the fallacy of considering a work of art to be some kind of immediate translation of the artist's emotions or ruminations has apparently been entirely supplanted by the idea that art is "expression" of the most direct and superficial kind. The artist doesn't "express" him/herself by creating discrete and complex works of art, but by pouring all those pent-up feelings, unimpeded by aesthetic devices, right on to the canvas or the page. So much for Keats's notion of "negative capability," in which the artist is able to subsist in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts," or T.S.Eliot's insight that creating great art and poetry is precisely an "escape from personality." Art and self-assertion have become mostly indistiguishable. (And as Eliot further puts it, "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.")

Presumably, Waldemar Januszczak is arguing that the "scary" qualities of Ruben's art come not from a direct expression of them but as a kind of emanation from his "unconscious." But this is mostly a distinction without a difference. Januszcsak can only render this judgment by generalizing from the paintings he's looking at, and his assertions that they reveal Rubens to be a sadomasochist do not depend upon their being either conscious or unconscious acts. His "true" feelings and beliefs are being expressed regardless. But of course Januszczak doesn't know anything about what Rubens was thinking or feeling while painting these works. At best, he's reducing great art to the delineation of the artist's character, his "soul." At worst, he's using great art as an excuse for making cheap and sensationalized remarks.

Narrative Stuff

In a recent interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rick Moody says of his new novel, The Diviners, that

Once I knew this novel was going to have a lot to do with TV, I thought the book itself could be structured that way: episodic. . .I really believe an uninterrupted non-continuous narrative is more realistic than American realistic fiction writing.

One appreciates Moody's desire to justify unconventional fiction to readers and book columnists, but his conception of both "realistic fiction writing" and the possible alternative to it is rather fuzzy.

That a novel might be "episodic"--even through mimicking the tv episode--does not mean it can't be "realistic" in the conventional sense of the term. An "episode" is a unit of narrative structure; in a given fiction, this episode could be intensely realistic or utterly fantastic. What Moody is really opposing in his effort to string together "uninterrupted" episodes is what he later calls "that smooth flowing narrative stuff." He wants to disrupt the well-made plot, not subvert realism as the attempt to accurately represent the world via "narrative stuff." In fact, some of the great works of American realism--Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, Winesburg, Ohio--are best described as "episodic" rather that "smooth flowing" in their use of plot. (And the greatest realistic short stories tend to be episodes rather than stories per se--see Chekhov or Joyce or Hemingway.)

Indeed, Moody doesn't really seem to want to abandon realism at all. It's just that his preferred sort of "noncontinuous" narrative is "more realistic" than the traditional kind. One has to conclude from the tenor of his words that Moody believes in the philosophical project of realism--to portray the world "as it is"--but doesn't think conventional story form is any longer adequate in fulfilling it. This was also the assumption behind the original works of "psychological realism" in the early twentieth century. Novels like Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway or The Sound and the Fury had to "go internal" because the techniques devised by the previous generation of realists, mostly focusing on event and external detail, were proving inadequate to the task of depicting what was "really real" about our sense of the world, namely subjective human consciousness. Various kinds of surrealism and absurdism were developed for more or less the same reason: In an increasingly disordered and absurd world, only disorderly and absurdist narrative strategies would suffice to capture it.

These are all perfectly good ways of dealing with the problem of representation--and had the side benefit of extending the formal possibilities of fiction. But I'm not so sure it's such a good idea to continue to defend innovative fiction--if that indeed is what Rick Moody writes--by arguing that ultimately it's more real than realism. In many ways the debate about unconventional narrative structures has already been won. Most readers of serious fiction are willing to accept discontinuous, circular, and unsettled storytelling. It would be more interesting to see an apologia for experimental fiction that rejected accuracy of representation as a goal, that advocated for a fiction true to its own aesthetic logic rather than to a "reality" that will always remain beyond representation in words, however artfully composed. That built a truly alternative fictional world out of them instead, rather than pretending to re-present the already prosaic world we have to live in.

Discomforting

I'm mostly quite sympathetic to Jonathan Lethem's fulminations against the privileging of "realism" over other approaches to the writing of fiction:

. . .Fiction is a gigantic construction, a bauble. A novel is not life. That’s why it’s so pointless that this relentless baiting goes on, where ‘realist’ fiction is pitted against ‘anti-realist’ fiction as though one of the two has made some kind of commitment of integrity to be real, a responsibility the other has abdicated. Listen: every novel is a piece of wrought plastic. Readers may not wish to dwell on this fact, and I feel no necessity that they do, but writers, in order be intelligent about the innate properties of their medium, must come to grips with it. Fiction, like language, is innately artificial and innately fabulous. It’s made of metaphor. . .

Although his next assertion is more difficult to accept:

Language itself is a fantastic element. It’s not possible to plant words in the ground and have seeds grow up and feed on the results. It’s not part of the biological or mechanical world.

I understand the point Lethem is making--language in fiction and poetry is used for verbal creation, not for "reflecting" the "real world" in some unmediated way--but of course language is a part of the biological world. It's an innate capacity of the biological creature called a human being, and human beings use written language--which is an artifically constructed system, if not a "fantasitic element"--to among, other things, write novels. This is as "natural" a human activity as any other. What is required for works of literature to be accepted as the kind of distinctive activity their authors conceive them to be is for everyone involved--readers, critics, writers themselves--to acknowledge that in this particular instance, the exercise of the imagination we call fiction or poetry, language has a license to wander where it will, if necessary unmooring itself completely from the constraints of representing reality in its most familiar forms. This is a pragmatic move, not one demanded by the "innate" qualities of language (either as innately representational or "innately fabulous").

And I really can't agree with this, either, although again I understand Lethem's impatience with the critics he's referring to:

. . .When you encounter the argument that there is a hierarchy where certain kinds of literary operations—which we’ll call ‘realism,’ for want of a handier term, though I’ll insist on the scare quotes—represent the only authentic and esteemed tradition, well, it’s a load of horseshit. When you see or hear that kind of hierarchy being proposed, it’s not a literary-critical operation. It’s a class operation. In that system of allusions, of unspoken castes and quarantines, mimetic fiction is associated with propriety, with the status quo defending itself, anxiously, against incursions from the great and wooly Beyond. When ‘realism’ is esteemed over other kinds of literary methods, you’re no longer in a literary-critical conversation; you’ve entered a displaced conversation about class. About the need for the Brahmin to keep an Untouchable well-marked and in close proximity, in order to confirm his role as Brahmin. . . .

I don't believe that a preference for realism is the expression of a class bias. Perhaps there are times when "mimetic fiction is associated with propriety, with the status quo defending itself," but these are more often occasions for ideological critics and hack journalists to express their own professional anxieties and intellectual limitations than deliberate attempts to shore up class boundaries. It's more often the case that particular critics, even critics who otherwise take literary criticism seriously, simply don't have much use for the notion that reading fiction should provide us with a specifically aesthetic experience (or don't have the ability to experience it that way). Instead, they view it as another way acquiring information, of gaining insight about "social conditions" or "culture" or "Mind," an opportunity to reflect on various and sundry ideas. Such critics disdain experiemental or irrealist fiction (or even just insistently comic fiction) because the farther one gets from realism conventionally defined, the harder it becomes to apply these critical methods.

Lethem is on firmer ground when he suggests that "Once you begin looking at the underlying premise—a blanket attack on the methods that modernism uncovered—the kind of bogus nostalgia for a pure, as opposed to an impure, literature, what you really discover is a discomfort with literature itself." Confining what's acceptably literary to "realism" is an efficient way of dispensing with all those quarrelsome writers who break the rules, who think literary art is necessarily "impure" insofar as its possibilities are still being discovered. It keeps literature stagnant, which is effectively to destroy it.

Alive and Poetic

Jonathan Mayhew is

"increasingly interested in language as it actually already exists rather than language as it is dressed up for various "poetic" uses. That is, I like poems that make use of the ways in which language is already alive and poetic, rather than those that view ordinary language as insufficient and attempt to remedy this situation."

Josh Corey believes that

"in addition to being whatever else it is, poetry, by being composed of language, resembles and tends to draw into itself recognizable chunks of other sorts of discourse: argument, philosophy, begging letters, what have you. This creates a confusion that you could lament, or that you could accept as intrinsic to the form and therefore just as you play with rhyme, alliteration, imagery, etc."

Language "as it actually already exists" is, of course, partially comprised of "recognizable chunks" of various discourses. Poetry (I would expand this to self-consciously "literary" language in general) will inevitably draw the already-existing elements of linguistic practice into itself, and, as Jonathan points out, often enough the most "poetic" uses of language come from an imaginative shuffling of these elements rather than a straining after the kind of ornamental effect some readers associate with poetry.

I am interested in these comments because too often, in my opinion, readers interpret writing that incorporates the kinds of discourse Josh Corey mentions as somehow signalling an intention to make arguments or engage in debates about "philosophy" very broadly construed. Since literature occurs in a less "pure" medium than painting or sculpture or music, it is finally impossible to entirely avoid leading fiction and poetry into such debates (or at least into debates about whether they are indeed participating in debates), but as Josh says, for readers and critics to rush in after them and assume that "signs" operate in literary language exactly as they do in ordinary discourse is to ignore the fact that poets ultimately see them as something to "play with as a material for poetry." (Often enough, in order to deliberately confound our "ordinary" understanding of language as communication.)

There's something about the element of "play" in literature that makes certain kinds of readers and critics impatient. (Especially American readers. If we must have "literature," let's have it straight, please. Just tell me what you mean.) If they can't simply dismiss it, they'll wrangle it into shape as a vehicle for this or that rhetorical gesture, either one that can be approved or one that merits only our disregard. (I'm thinking of the kind of fiction review to be found in such publications as The New Republic and the New York Review of Books, as well as all the endless complaining about "postmodern" excess.) Neither are these critics likely to appreciate "the ways in which language is already alive and poetic," since this would call into question their own reduction of language into acts of critical drudgery and trivial blather. Of course, most such critics (and most book reviews and other "literary" publications) generally ignore poetry anyway, which only seems to confirm we don't really like our art to be too arty.

What Happens Internally

A while back, Stephen Hunter wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which he examined the differences between fiction and Hollywood films taking fiction as "source." At one point he makes this claim:

. . .The primary issue in prose is motive: You have to understand why the people do what they do, or else the whole shebang falls apart as illusion. The minds of the characters have to be consistent to be believable; action has to flow from character. Fiction writing is about what happens internally, even if lots of guns come out and stuff blows up.

I know that a lot of people believe that this difference between the external and the internal is an important distinction to make between fiction and film, and that drawing it usually results in an implicit--or not so implict--valorization of fiction over film. Fiction gives us access to "the mind" of a character in a way film cannot; a corrollary of this is that the internal view is perforce a defining feature of fiction, that those stories and novels (particularly the latter) making a claim to be "serious" must provide it or risk being dismissed as not properly literary.

It is true that often the difference between a given novel and its adaptation to film is the greater focus on "mind" in the former. But this is a difference that is really only palpable when otherwise the novel and the film have much in common, when it was possible to adapt the novel to film to begin with because they both emphasize character, setting, plot in more or less conventional ways. (When finally the guns do come out and stuff does blow up.) In my opinion, the internal/external oppositon is not a very solid peg on which to hang one's hat in promoting fiction's putatively greater sophistication. We all recognize the ultimate tradeoff: immediacy in film vs. "depth" in fiction. But what makes depth the more valuable property? In aesthetic terms, why is it important to provide such depth in the first place? If you're more interested in "empathy" or "motive" than in art, perhaps.

What if you don't really care about "believability"? What if character is something you're not really interested in at all, except insofar as it enables the fiction's aesthetic design? Is such a writer (or reader) not being serious? What if it doesn't matter whether action follows from character? Couldn't character follow from action, if incident and event comprise the engine of aesthetic effect? Couldn't you dispense with action altogether? Couldn't you dispense with character altogether? (Think Beckett's later work.) Some writers want the "whole shebang" of illusion to fall apart. It's precisely a way to divert the reader's attention to some of the other aesthetic possibilities of fiction. Why is this less "serious" than writing the same old character-based story in which we get supposedly "luminous" glimpses into that abstraction called "human consciousness"?

Such fiction as I am describing would indeed be (mostly) unfilmable, at least according to currently reigning ideas about what film properly does as well. But wouldn't this be the whole point? We wouldn't need to have advice about how to approach a film based on a novel. They'd each have their own separate and entirely respectable jobs to do.

Staying at a Holiday Inn

From Time's interview with Neil Young:

I'm as predictable as a Holiday Inn when you really look at me. I keep doing the same thing all over again. I just make records, and the records are usually some sort of turnabout from the last record. It took me a long time to write this record [Prairie Wind]. I didn't write anything for two years after Greendale. . .'cause Greendale was a completely draining experience and a huge project that I think was one of the best things I have been able to do in my life, and a lot of people were lost by it, but that doesn't mean anything. A lot of people in the middle of the road don't pick up on what I'm doing when I'm not in the middle of the road, and it's an accident and a pleasant one when I do end up [there] and traffic is with me.

Undoubtedy it is Young's "acoustic records" that are most likely to take him to the "middle of the road". For those whose acquaintance with Young's music began with "Heart of Gold" or Harvest, they're more pleasant to listen to than the raucous rock'n roll records or the bitterly introspective albums like Tonight's the Night or On the Beach. Praire Wind will likely appeal to such listeners.

The first time I listened to this new album, I came to a conclusion similar to John Kenyon's:

. . .The disc has a few memorable moments, but like much of his work in the past decade, it is disappointing, containing neither the strong melodies nor homespun wordplay that elevates the best of his work. Instead we get odd namechecks of Chris Rock, the umpteenth song about Elvis being "the King" and a tune about Young's guitar.

I've listened to it about five times now, and it gets better each time I hear it. It's true that the disc doesn't have many "strong melodies" (except for, perhaps "The King," which is indeed more or less a throwaway, but I like it nonetheless), and the lyrics are more plainspoken in their, in this case, directly homespun way. Musically speaking, one could swear that some of the songs are near-cousins to those on Comes a Time or Harvest Moon. But the theme of the record (or one of the themes) is the passage of time, and songs that recall old Neil Young songs is arguably an appropriate way to emphasize lyrics that often evoke Young's childhood and his childhood home in Winnipeg, Canada.

This memorial quality is, of course, also appropriate for a group of songs that were written while Young was being diagnosed and treated for a brain aneurysm. But their pensive tone (leavened with humor, it must be said) never becomes merely sentimental, and the country-ish feel of many of them lends them a certain dignity. It's the kind of record that's best appreciated as a sequential whole rather than as a collection of discrete songs--in my opinion, something one finds in all too few pop music albums these days.

At any rate, the release of Praire Wind gives me an opportunity to voice how much Neil Young's music has meant to me for a very long time, and, because of that, how much leeway I'm willing to give him when he produces an album that's maybe only "middling" rather than great. If you want great, go listen again to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.

Conservative and Mannered

In a post reflecting on the career of the recently deceased film director Robert Wise, Flickhead observes that

Nearly a household name during the days of West Side Story and The Sound of Music—their poster graphics were once an inescapable, integral part of ‘60s pop culture—Wise was virtually forgotten a decade later. Whether viewers who are now in their twenties or thirties will ever screen his pictures seems doubtful. Like so much of pre-1980’s American film culture, Robert Wise represents a cinematic language that’s rarely ever spoken anymore.

Wise may not be as well-known as he once was, but in my opinion it's simply incorrect to say that he "represents a cinematic language that's rarely evey spoken anymore." To the extent that Wise possessed "mannered, conservative instincts," as Flickhead also puts it, he seems to me to epitomize current Hollywood filmmaking. (I don't necessarily mean to disparage Wise's achievements; some of his films--The Body Snatcher, Born to Kill, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting--are very good indeed.) The vast majority of Hollywood movies are every bit as formulaic, predictable, and vacuously "well-made" as most of the films to come out of the "machine" in operation during the so-called "golden era" that also produced a director like Wise. Although there is a more vibrant independent film culture now, I can't say that very many of the films produced by the indies seem to me particularly radical or experimental. At best these films are more idiosyncratic, less obviously commercical in content, but they're hardly groundbreaking in technique. I've seen nothing in recent years that makes me think about the possibilities of the film medium in fresh ways. (Memento came close, but Christopher Nolan's subsequent films have been notably disappointing. And David Lynch continues to provoke.) Slices of life, coming of age stories, and "quirky" comedies predominate, and we're exposed to few characters who can't be played by the likes of Ben Stiller and Jason Lee.

What made the golden age of Hollywood "golden" was that despite the strictures and conservative assumptions of the studio system, directors of more than ordinary talent and with distinctive styles--Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Sturges--were nevertheless able to flourish. There was room for skillful, artistically respectable filmmaking despite the commercial imperatives with which these directors had to live. Now all is commerce, the cost of making films and the need to find financing on a project-by-project basis seemingly requiring an adherence to established codes and conventions. Robert Wise certainly does not belong in the same artistic company as Ford or Hitchcock, but his "conservative" approach has hardly been superseded by contemporary directors of the usual Hollywood product.

Notice: Anyone who would like to set me straight and point me to recent films that do indeed encourage us to "think about the possibilities of the film medium in fresh ways" are hereby invited to do so.

On Lunar Park

I confess up front that I have read none of Bret Easton Ellis's fiction before Lunar Park. Nothing in the way his previous books have been described or promoted made me think they would be worthwhile reading, and both the hoopla surrounding his first two books (boy writer makes good, portraits of an era, blah blah blah) and the "controversy" provoked around American Psycho made me if anything even less disposed to bother with him. It all seemed like such a transparent way to concoct an artificial excitement about a writer (some writer, any writer) at a time when it was becoming difficult for fiction to compete for the fashion dollar in an increasingly hyped-up "media environment."

But then I read two reviews of Lunar Park by critics/bloggers whose judgments I generally trust, Traver Kauffman (Rake's Progress) and Steven Shaviro (The Pinocchio Theory). These reviews made me think that perhaps I had been unfair to Ellis, that despite the bad impression left by the publication and reception of his previous work he was a writer of some interest after all.

Thus I really did want to like Lunar Park. I wanted the satisfication of a new, if belated, discovery; I wanted the critical insights offered up in these reviews (both very intelligently presented) to be borne out in my experience of reading the novel. Alas. While I cant' go so far as Steve Almond, who asserted "It may be the worst novel I've ever read," I can say I found it to be pretty dreary indeed. I'm still not sure I understand the resolution of all of its various Stephen King-derived horror-narrative tropes and devices, but then by the time I got to the part of the novel where these things were apparently going to be explained, I really didn't care anymore.

Traver's primary contention is that, despite its implausibilities, Lunar Park is finally "creepy and compelling entertainment." Unfortunately, the novel seemed to me not at all creepy, but all too bland and formulaic. The first chapter promises some interesting variations on the metafictional device of creating a presumably fictionalized persona for the author of the novel we're reading--necessitating that we refer to LP's protagonist as "Bret Easton Ellis"--but this quickly enough spends itself in the entirely uninteresting scenario in which "BEE" has married a famous actress and is attempting to raise a family in the suburbs. None of the histrionic attempts to enliven this scenario with father-son, husband-wife, and writer-celebrity "tensions" can counterbalance the fact that we (or at least I) don't give much of a damn about this situation or about "BEE"'s struggle to free himself from the demons that have haunted him all the way through his pathetic career as a Famous Author. "BEE" is an extremely annoying character, and nothing that Bret Easton Ellis can do in depicting his persona's hapless self-scrutiny can modify him over the course of the novel except to the extent that he moves from being merely unpleasant to being utterly contemptible.

Perhaps the "entertainment" value here lies in the very extremity of this character's cluelessness. Perhaps we're to enjoy, even admire, the way in which Bret Easton Ellis is willing to portray "Bret Easton Ellis" as a transcendent jerk. But what would be the point of this? A kind of mea culpa for the years of bad behavior in which Bret Easton Ellis has allegedly indulged? Who cares? A figurative thumb-in-the-eye of all those who have accused him of such behavior? (You want depraved? How about this?) For those of us who don't care about Bret Easton Ellis's behavior, bad or otherwise, this is hardly edge-of-the seat drama. And I certainly did not find Lunar Park's horror story contrivances to be "compelling entertainment." As it happens, I like horror fiction and films perfectly well (not Stephen King--I can't get past the fact that he's simply a poor writer), but the efforts Ellis makes to incorporate horror conventions into this novel are just plain incompetent. I didn't believe in any of them, and some of the episodes in which Ellis tries to be "creepy" are embarassing. (The scene in which a "paranormal investigator" cleanses "BEE"'s house reads like an inept imitation of Poltergeist--and the faux naivete with which "BEE" confronts it all doesn't help a bit.) I continued reading Lunar Park to the end only because I kept thinking Ellis might ultimately do something surprsing with these horror conventions or might bring out some redeeming quality in "BEE" I just wasn't seeing. Suffice it to say that neither happened.

Steven Shaviro, in his review of the book, goes beyond simply claiming that LP is an entertaining read. He thinks that it has higher ambitions, that BEE is engaged in "exploring and reflecting upon our current post-literary, multimedia culture." (If he's also admitting that Bret Easton Ellis is himself "post-literary," I would, at least, agree with this, but for some (unspecified) reason he actually considers Ellis "an extraordinarily literary and writerly writer.") He thinks that Lunar Park, unlike anything Ellis has written before, is "a novel of interiority," but that "the interiority that the novel so powerfully suggests is just as powerfully, indeed quite savagely and gleefully, deconstructed":

The narrator’s introspection reveals only that he has no depths and no center, and that everything he does is driven by outside forces and superficial motives. The novel is filled with sincere moments of longing and confession and reform, with moments of the desire to go straight, “to get back to basics”. . .but each of these moments ends up being framed as a theatrical performance, being suspended “in quotation marks,” being revealed as an expression of social conformism, of what you are supposed to feel, even if nobody ever actually does.

I find this argument wholly unconvincing. Essentially we are to believe that BEE has created "BEE" precisely in order to make us hate him, that the silly, tedious narrative he has constructed is intended to be silly and tedious so we can understand the silliness and tedium of our "mutimedia culture." This is an awful lot of weight to put on a novel simply because its author decided to frame it with a metafictional device and by doing so invoke the kind of "postmodern" analysis Shaviro duly provides. BEE didn't write a bad novel in order to parody the "self-referentiality" of modernism and postmodernism. He just wrote a bad novel.

It would seem that Steven Shaviro really values Lunar Park because its self-referentiality doesn't merely point us to "the supremacy of the imagination" or make "the assertion that everything is language, everything is text." Instead it "presents a kind of collapse, an involution, but more into the boredom and horror of the everyday, and into the multiple mirrors of the movie-video-internet-entertainment complex":

This means that Lunar Park tends to show us how selves and desires are social fictions. Existentially, we are thrown back on these images and effects, these mirror reflections, and it is as foolish to dismiss them as phony as it is to invest them with mystical qualities, as if they were deeper and more resonant than they actually are. Politically, however, these effects and images have a lot to do with the social positions that we inhabit. . . .

I'm afraid I find this all a convenient excuse to overlook the fact that Lunar Park is, aesthetically speaking, a badly paced, badly shaped, and badly written novel. Ellis is not interested in "the supremacy of imagination" because, as far as I can see, he has no imagination, and he's not interested in the "textuality" of language because he has no feel for language. (Ellis's style is relentlessly ordinary at best; even when he seems to be setting out on a stylistic excursion of sorts, such as the scene in which "BEE" imagines his father's ashes finally being dispersed into the wind, his language is so banal--"They drifted over a mother's smile and shaded a sister's outstretched hand and shifted past all the things you wanted to share with everyone"--one has to force one's eyes not to film over.) Shaviro seems to be willing to settle for the almost certainly unintended "political" critique contained in a book that just happens to be about celebrity and wealth and that surrounds its characters with the "multimedia" accoutrements of the day. I'm not willing to settle for this myself, much less to critically elevate an undeserving book simply because its "subject" can be made to seem like relevant cultural commentary.

Although I would otherwise never think to compare Bret Easton Ellis with Philip Roth (Roth is a real novelist, Ellis seems one manufactured by the "book business"), Lunar Park nevertheless resembles The Plot Against America in at least one way: Both books are essentially memoirs about their authors' fathers, attempts to capture some fundamental and enduring fact of parental influence through the more imaginative possibilities of fiction. Roth wants to portray his father as heroic; Ellis depicts his as malign. But each winds up writing novels that are needlessly overworked and inflated. Roth, at least, brings his usual intelligence and vigorous prose style to The Plot Against America. There are no such compensations in Lunar Park. Ellis would have been better advised, if he were determined to write about his father (about his own life more generally), to produce a straighforward memoir or autobiography. It might not have sold as many copies as Lunar Park, but it surely would have been better able to justify its existence.