Review: The Savage Detectives

I haven't put anything up here in a while, and I'm not sure if anybody even follows this, but I figured I'd post a review of a book I recently read and tie it in to a discussion a friend and I recently had.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano isn't quite as postmodern as it gets, but is probably as postmodern as literature coherently gets (compare to Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest, both classics in their own ways, but with long, long [some would say novel-long] stretches of incoherence) ... sort of.

I've seen some say that the book doesn't have a plot, which isn't quite true. The "plot" is contained within two short sections at the beginning and the end of the book detailing (in the form of diary entries) a (for all I can tell) fictional literary movement called "visceral realism", something that is never really elaborated upon other than the immense list of authors and poets that are akin and opposite of visceral realism. These sections detail the lives of two prominent visceral realists (Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima ... their archetypes are obvious) as they live in Mexico City and work to establish their movement. Gradually, the two leave Mexico City with two younger kids (a prostitute and an aspiring visceral realist [who happens to be the diarist]) in search of a mythical poet (Caeserea) whom they feel will help establish their movement (their departure marks the end of the first section). The final section follows these four as they wander the desert in search of the poetess.

However, those who indicate the lack of a plot are certainly talking about the middle section which, in total, is lengthier than the endpieces. This section takes the form of a series of documentary-style interviews of people who Belano and/or Lima have encountered after the Caeserea sections (meaning, taking place after the events in the final section) by some unknown narrator. The interviews are very loose and tend to jump all over the place, but they do establish a definite timeline of what happens to the two men. Lima becomes isolated, vagrant, and passionless, a barely-memorable phantom drifting throughout Europe and Latin America. Belano is impulsive, a lover, and a fighter, remarkable, but no less transient in the lives of those he encounters. To capture the connotations, I imagine you could call Lima a "wraith" and Belano a "spirit" (I'm having trouble coming up with terms for "good" or benevolent ghosts).

Belano seems more interested not in the plot, not in the actual crucial events of the novel, but rather in the assessment of the damage (something I imagine to be true of his other book 2666). The beauty of the central section is that the moods are masterfully established, beginning lightly and comedically and gradually establishing an ominous mood for the lives of both men. By the last of the interviews, the tension, the fear that something awful is about to happen is palpable and, agonizingly enough, never quite gets fully resolved. (I've heard similar statements about the ambience of 2666) These guys are drifters, voluntarily disenfranchised (pretty much), and dealing with the things that happened to them in each their own way, but you feel life, or something greater (fate, perhaps) encroaching ... it's wonderfully and subtly suspenseful, flooring you with a thousand paper cuts when other authors could only do it with a sledgehammer.

The erratic and disjoint structure of the novel is going to turn many readers off (some people require strong plotting and an objective to arc into), but I'm the sort that appreciates a well-executed picaresque novel (I always recall A Passage to India as being of this sort) and the characterization is mythical, but convincingly so. The interviews are gripping in that the interviewees know nothing of what the other are going to say, yet the accounts all fit together to give the reader something of a picture of what happens to Lima and Belano as they wander. I loved it.

But the discussion that eventually followed is one of where literature goes next. I'm far from an expert in literature; I am an avid reader (especially of generally modern literature), but I am hardly a scholar of the craft. Okay, well then, here's my take.

It's probably not going to be a secret that literature is in some sort of jeapardy right now, which certainly makes a question about the future of literature rather dubious indeed. I'll start by mentioning a theme by David Foster Wallace that irony is destroying literature (and by some form of extension) our cultural society. The irony and satirical drama (as opposed to straight satire) and the overblown novel are making a noble artform hollow and even panderous to whatever demographic is can grab. I absolutely agree, though it should be mentioned that DFW is among the more overblown and arguably gimmicky writers out there (extensive use of footnotes, obscure references, absolutely overblown scenarios, etc.), and whether this was some form of subversion or he figured it was a legitimate, unironic way to treat fiction or whether he sincerely wrote this way and didn't realize the ... irony ... remains unknown to me. But he's a pretty smart guy so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Enter a new wave of fiction. I don't read everything out there and I try to read stuff with a bit of "wider" cred (usually the NY Times), so I'll discuss three novels of the recent past, all of which would probably fall under James Wood's characterization of "hysterical fiction" or "magical realism" (I think more the former): Everything is Illuminated, White Teeth, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I enjoyed them all to varying degrees (hated Everything is Illuminated more or less front to back, grudingly enjoyed Special Topics, and was tepid on White Teeth until the rather, I thought, graceful ending). Anyway, what can we see among the recent crop of highly acclaimed current literature?

Protagonists without flaws: the characterization of the protagonists, or anybody who could pretty much qualify as a "good guy" is pristine to the point of absolute shallowness. The characters are precocious, infinitely curious, gifted beyond their station, and every other sort of blessing you could give to somebody. (I'm not going to look all of this up, so I'm just going to make vague references) The tour guide in Everything... is clever, funny, resourceful, sympathetic, delightfully and obliviously raunchy, and has a way esoterically named dog. Blue van Meer in Special Topics... is familiar with a literary canon that a college English professor would aspire to know, is eminently charming, and, again, resourceful beyond her station (even her father, despite being somewhat distant, comes across as being pretty much the ideal dad). And then even when the characters do have flaws, such as Irie's (from White Teeth) pudginess or her mother Clara's missing teeth, it becomes a focal point of their decency ... these are defects foisted upon these characters and they triumph in spite of it all. I like a decent person as much as the next guy, but an author's absolute refusal to add any (negative) complexity to characters that she loves so dearly results in some of the flattest characterizations that you'll encounter. What happened to Nabokov's grossly sympathetic Humbert Humbert, or Dostoevsky's highly nuanced (Raskolnikov, Prince Mishkin, ...)? It gets actually really tedious reading about yet another precocious kid with the world in his hands and no discernable deficiencies whatsoever. (The counterpoint to this, I guess, is the even more tiresome, everybody's deeply flawed, but please still sympathize with them ... a noble but incredibly difficult trick to pull because if you try to make your characters "deeply" flawed they're going to be plain unlikeable, as in The Emperor's Children, a truly awful book).

Everything is bigger than it is: this is the 21st century ... we can't be writing about trivial things like individual human relationships and our reactions to them (something Amy Hempel does beautifully in her short stories, though my sister was somewhat tepid to her writing). No, rather, our stories must contend with the Holocaust, our thorny scientific future, 9/11, or any form of Armageddon. Because it makes absolute sense to pair a precocious 12-year-old with a plot that involves the nuanced ethics of cloning and genetics (White Teeth) or 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, another Jonathan Safran Foer work) or whatever. Why must modern literature validate itself behind a screen of something really meaningful, which, in many cases ends up invalidating both the work of art and the historic event being leveraged (think of Titanic, which was cheapened by how it used the disaster as a crutch and also cheapened the disaster itself by reducing a devastating loss of human life to the plight of two ... presumably fictional ... teenage lovers). How does Irie's romantic plight and entanglement justify overshadowing the immense ethical scientific complexity of FutureMouse and also then why is the whole FutureMouse subplot (as ingeniously as the whole thing comes together, and it is really enjoyable) necessary as a part of the characterization of the people involved? Some authors may say that it's fiction, that people have to do something, and have certain things in their lives and best to keep it interesting. Yes, this is true ... to a point ... better an FBI agent than a bank teller, perhaps ... but much beyond that point you are using shallow characterization and the cheap selling out of serious historical / ethical / philosophical issues to prop each other up.

But where does literature need to go? One obvious answer is to where it will sell ... books are a dying species and at these times it's difficult to advocate being choosy. Do we need more Harry Potter (I hear they're actually quite well-written) or Twilight (they may be well-written, though I haven't heard) because they sell? The capitalist will vehemently agree. Let's ignore that ... where ought literature, artistically, go? Well, this becomes certainly subjective, but I'll take a stab. How about we start with a bit of sincerity and some minuteness of scale? Treat characters and circumstances honestly, avoiding the sorts of scenes where the good parts are the absolute pinnacles of history and the bad moments are the dreariest moments in humankind. Do the work to allow your characters some complexity in personality and emotion ... oh, it'll be tough, but avoid the protagonist who is 12-years-old, is as adept as E. Lit. as Calculus, speaks three languages (two fluently) and has designs on going to Harvard (she eventually gets in) and is as cute as a button and her only family strife is that her mother just had to up and die in a car accident (it wasn't her fault). There is no sincerity in that character. In fact, that characterization (cribbed, basically from Special Topics) is almost a flat insult to any sophisticated reader. That Blue van Meer nearly commits no sins of her own (and those that she does commit are regrettably due to circumstance) is just piling on. Much better to have a Coetzee or some Roth and DeLillo that undergo some transformative arc or (in the case of most of Roth and some DeLillo, if they don't hit that transformative arc, the characterization is deep and they are stricken for their staticness). Or how about a plain story about people in situations that people actually encounter? Have we really exhausted all that we can say about a close friend's demise to cancer. See Amy Hempel's magnificent and unbelievably poignant short "In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried" in which she packs more characterization in an (admittedly pithy and somewhat unrealistic) single line of dialogue about something relatively prosaic and commonplace (a friend's terminal illness) than some others can accomplish in hundreds of pages of text about "fantastical" characters involved in huge global matters like the Holocaust. It's so hollow and such a waste and utterly graceless. Will it happen? Do people want to read about real people in real circumstances in an utterly unadorned but enlightened way? Can literature yet avoid the fate of film and even television in the demand to do more more more until you have giant space robots threatening to take over the world and you have the world's most charming and loveable dork both earning control over the benevolent version of these robots and winning the affection of an absolutely gorgeous woman (who's "deep" in that she's smart at certain things and is not an absolute raging bitch)? Oh, and back rubs all around.

I don't know. I'm skeptical. I think that authors know the score. I'd imagine authors, fiction and non-fiction alike, write for the screen more than the bookshelf because that's where the payout is. Who's going to make a film or a TV show out of a short story dealing with terminal illness? Nobody. Who's going to make a film or TV show about a guy going to Poland to find his lost grandparents with a precocious kid, a "blind" grandfather, and a dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. as guides? Oh, and it's a Holocaust story too. It's been done. Or about a once suicidal pudgy Brit, a Jamaican immigrant with missing teeth (and used to be so counterculture) and their pudgy daughter, their Islamic friend (and war buddy to said suicidal Brit) and his twin sons (and their complicated "romance" with pudgy daughter) and some extra romantic complication thrown in for the hell of it? Oh, and there's some serious scientific / ethical complications. Well, that's been done too. And then even Special Topics... has been optioned. I guess we're just in a post-paper society.

But maybe, after all this ink, I really shouldn't complain. I ultimately enjoyed (to some extent) two of the three books I mentioned and some of the modern vanguards of the sincere, human novel, let's say Ian McEwen and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, have been absolute bores to me. Not to say that it couldn't be done better: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and (my fave) Faulkner seemed to turn the trick pretty well.

Commute

The only thing I hear is the gentle barum-barum of the subway on the tracks; it is rush hour in New York City. The train is a landscape of dangling earbuds, open novels, and folded tabloids, all attached to people who contribute to the long stretches of silence punctuated by declarations of location and general admonitions.

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ Now arriving at 14th St, Union Square. _____ _____ _____ Stand clear of the closing doors.

I squeeze in amongst the passengers and open my own novel.

"That's an excellent book." A Confederacy of Dunces.

"Oh yeah?" I ask, looking up.

"Oh yeah, one of my favorites," replies a woman, probably in her sixties, clutching an oversize Duane Reade bag.

Once, when a friend and I had seen a woman with such a bag, I asked him the most absurd thing he could imagine her keeping in a bag like that and he instinctively replied, "Condoms." My response had been Wite-Out because I could understand the compulsion to by condoms, but I had no idea what a woman like that would do with so much Wite-Out.

He guessed she'd probably use the Wite-Out how we all use it.

Now arriving at 23rd Street.

After a moment she continues, "I'll never look at a hot dog the same way again."

I haven't read to this part of the book yet but I wonder how she previously considered a hot dog. And, I guess, how her perception of a hot dog could change. "Oh yeah."

The train's emptied and by now I've taken a seat; the woman hefts her bag and takes the seat next to me, silently, looking at me sidelong.

This woman, she isn't beautiful, of course, and barely seems to know what to say to me but still I ask her, "What stop are you getting off at?"

"Lincoln Center Station. You?"

New York City overwhelms me, the sixty-or-so commuters who have barely registered my face, to whom my voice is mildly annoying. New York City, despite all its reticence, is a continuous judgment. A young, pretty Latino girl across the aisle from me has her eyebrow casually cocked at me; it's jarring to a Midwesterner. Two black men down the aisle begin to sing hip-hop, but it doesn't do much to change the atmosphere of the train. The atmosphere suddenly feels permeated with scrutiny, I've got to transfer at Times Square, but, "I'm getting off at Lincoln Center, too!" Unconsciously, I clutch the woman's shoulder, "Do you feel like getting a coffee?"

Barum-barum. Still, nobody speaks and the train remains silent. Now arriving at 42nd Street, Times Square. She nods almost imperceptibly. We reach 66th Street and, though I wouldn't be able to explain it, I follow the woman out the subway car.