ZAMM

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Value
By Robert M. Pirsig

My initial interest in this book was superficially driven by the "mystic wisdom of the Orient" stereotype. I first saw this book while waiting in line at my local library. Judging by the cover, it had something to offer because I could not fathom the relation between Zen and motorcycles. (It's an indirect correlation, it's all about approach) Anyway, I was immediately turned off by the book's thickness. The second time I saw it in the hands of a friend during senior year of high school. She was an interesting character, socially awkward; my favored type of person; and that was the second spark of interest in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. After spending some time reading through and exploring far Eastern ideas and improving my reading skills, I saw the book in the library's Reading List section and picked it up.
As a slow reader, this book was painstakingly long for me, especially around three quarters of the way through ZAMM. You'll have to have some strong drive to power through some dull parts of the book. I, for one, was most interested in the craft of a mind once labeled diseased by institutionalized society. Indeed, Pirsig's life was tragic such that he was in and out of mental institutions and his son died at a young age, but he's survived by his awesome intellect displayed and transcendent wisdom demonstrated in this book. ZAMM is chockfull of eye opening interpretations of modern life, which I've chosen to simplify into two quotes:
The Inquiry into Value

And what is good, Phaedrus
And what is not good--
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
- ZAMM, Plato

The meat of the book explores this topic, value. In this context is where he reconciles motorcycle maintenance and Zen. With a precise voice, he discusses multiple humanist approaches to technology and what quality is and from where it comes.
The Duality of the Recanted Mad Man

I haven't been carrying him at all.
He's been carrying me.
- Phaedrus, ZAMM

The other half of the story in ZAMM is that of he—the narrator is never really called by name—and his son. Their motorcycle trip west through the U.S. Midwest, through the mountain and plains, gives us ample room to draw out for ourselves inferences on the effect of technological advancement, the eternal state of the madman, and the impermanent and illusory qualities of the thin veils of "cure."
There are a few twists that add extra dimensions to the characters throughout the book.
At some 400 pages, ZAMM is really quite depressing and wonderful. It gets all the way down to the bottom of life's muck to exposes brilliant nuggs. Pirsig's words rise from the pages like the stale scent of cigarettes on a wet morning and form a map of modern technological life. From those same pages are some truths of life, an insightful discourse on the origins of structure, art and quality.

Falling Man

Falling Man
By Don DeLillo

My uncle worked in the Pentagon—in a wing that has been entirely remodeled within the last 7 years. He abruptly stopped working there about 7 years ago. Because of scale, attention, and video footage, the Twin Towers have always been surrogates in a story I’ve never fully imagined or sought. So how then does a writer at the forefront of abstract “postmodernism” begin to unravel monumental tragedy?

Beginning with the event itself, the novel centers on Keith Neudecker—a middle-aged lawyer who escapes one of the towers. He appears at the doorstep of his estranged wife Lianne whom he hasn’t spoken to in years. He is covered in blood and clutching a briefcase—neither of which belongs to him. Bookended between two vivid depictions of horror are these non-chronological scenes of attempted recovery, brutal prologue, and thoughtful memory.

Filling these vignettes is a cast of characters as impersonally inhabited as they are introduced: There is the owner of the briefcase who finds a victimized camaraderie with Keith, the European Lover who is convinced of America’s decline, the reticent Jihadist who becomes more and more convinced as he follows Mohamed Atta, the members of an Alzheimer’s writers group who record their memories not for themselves, the Poker night regulars who cannot bear to meet once two of the chairs remain empty, the children who watch the skies for a man named “Bill Lawton” after mishearing the name of the Al-Qaeda founder, and the titular falling man who does acts of performance art by hanging himself posed as the famous photograph of the man leaping from the World Trade Center.

Most of these characters are only named after a prolonged exposure to them in the third-person as a he or she; is the pronoun-effused anonymity of the novel’s body supposed to mirror the eardrum ringing confusion of the aftermath? Besides masterfully capturing the tragedy, horror, and confusion, I am unsure as to what DeLillo was trying to do. Perhaps he explains it through the Alzheimer’s writers who write for posterity. Perhaps the advice I received about the book also reinforces its role as history: don’t begin to read DeLillo with this book.

Cutting Lisa

Cutting Lisa
By Percival Everett

Some books are worth reading just for one sentence. Cutting Lisa is one of these books.
I've blogged about Percival Everett before, but let it suffice to say I think he is the single most under-recognized author in America today. His stark minimalist prose can be devastating or comforting depending on what Everett wants.
Cutting Lisa is about an older man named John who visits his adult son Elgin and creates a new, albeit temporary, life for himself there. The book, as all of Everett's seem to do, deals with a lot of issues in a surprisingly short number of pages. John starts a relationship with a much-younger woman at the same time as he makes new friends his own age. He reconnects with his granddaughter while he discovers his daughter-in-law's infidelities. John struggles to stay on top of everything as the world spins underneath him.
The narrative isn't necessarily one of an older man trying to keep up with changing times, although that is a bit of it. It's more about a man trying to reconnect with his family the only way he knows how. John and Elgin's relationship is incredibly well-written. It has a feeling closer to friendship than a father-son bond but still feels natural.
But what really ties the book together is the beginning and ending. The beginning is about John at the hospital in which he works (John is an obstetrician) and another doctor calls him in to see a woman who underwent a successful home c-section at the hands of her husband. It disturbs John but also strikes him as beautiful. The ending I'll leave for readers to find out, but it ties amazingly to the beginning and showcases Everett's absolute genius in his ability to craft stories. At just under 150 pages, it's closer to a short story than a novel, but the last line will leave you shaking.

No Logo

No Logo

By Naomi Klein

After finishing this book I feel like I need a shower. Klein chronicles the modern world of branding and the resistance it engenders. Her work is comprehensive and profoundly disturbing, as it should be.

Klein goes everywhere in this one book. From export processing zones in The Philippines (if you don't know what those are you should read the book and then go cry in a corner for a while) to street protests in England to NikeTown in New York. She does an incredible job linking diverse problems with the root cause of neoliberal global capitalism.

But she does more than just decry sweatshops, Klein analyzes the way corporations create meaning for us. At its heart No Logo is a book about branding and the declining freedom from it. She writes about how we got to where we are and the process of corporations renouncing "things" in order to produce mostly semiotic signs. She then describes what this means in terms of our present reality - temp jobs and advertisements everywhere with CEOs cashing multi-million dollar bonuses while workers try to find full-time employment.

Yet despite all the problems Klein describes, she doesn't leave the reader without some hopes. She does not cave in to the simple lesson of the story which would be that we can all do better by purchasing responsibly blah blah blah Thomas Friedman bullshit. Instead she makes clear that the only solution to an institutional problems is institutional. The stories of resistance that accompany every problem are heartening and a necessary component of the book so it doesn't turn into a misery-fest.

No Logo is compulsively readable, which isn't the case with all books about the evils of branding and global capitalism. Klein doesn't fall into the trap of feeling sorry for herself or the rest of us, but rather is genuinely looking toward future solutions. The world is fucked up, but we're gonna have something to say about it. The most important thing readers can gather from No Logo is awareness, and with such a wide-ranging comprehensive book, it's a perfect resource for any commodity-obsessed young person in your life.

Love in The Days of Rage

Love in The Days of Rage
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I swore I wasn't going to buy any books. The English Graduate Association sometimes sets up a table in the lobby of the English building and sells used books to fund programs. Paperbacks cost a dollar a piece. I looked over and decided there wasn't anything I really needed enough to add it to my pile, so I sat down and read a book out of my bag. But I couldn't stop peeking at the piles out the corner of my eye. I saw Love in The Days of Rage and knew I would have to surrender. When I saw another student move toward the pile, I got up and bought it. Resigned.
Love in The Days of Rage is short enough to be called a novella. At just over 100 pages, it's a quick read, although not as quick as I thought it would be. Ferlinghetti - one of my favorite of the beat poets - writes prose in an unsurprising poetic way. There are pages that could pass as excellent poems; metaphors and similes not usually found in works of prose.
The story is about a woman - Annie - an American expatriate artist living in Paris in 1968 in the midst of the student uprising. She meets a man named Julian, a Portuguese banker with radical anarchist beliefs. The story revolves around their relationship as they grow closer against the backdrop of the revolution outside.
The biggest achievement of Love in The Days of Rage is its ability to intertwine the personal and political. Annie wonders constantly if Julian is all he claims - how could he be both an insurrectionary anarchist and a bourgeois banker? And what can't he tell her? She loves him but has a hard time justifying dating a plutocrat in the midst of a revolution.
The depictions of the students is romantic in the best way. Ferlinghetti does his job and raises question about how effective the protests are. But the demonstrators and demonstrations seem, above all, beautiful. This is Ferlinghetti's talent put to use, showing not just the anger, but the beauty of the protests. He writes about how poetry is used as both a sword and a shield.
It doesn't have as much protest-porn as I would have liked, but it still makes me wish I had been there.

Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest

By John Updike

John Updike's magnum opus series - Rabbit Angstrom - is one of those works that should be read in high schools but isn't for a lot of different reasons. Updike doesn't have the tragedy of a Hemingway or the shyness of a Salinger. He's undoubtedly a modern canonical author, but his work doesn't fit in the current trend in the literary world. With the opening of the canon, most modern authors that have been added - at least to school book lists -are from underrepresented minority groups. Not that these books aren't worthy, but it leaves out excellent authors like Updike. I'd be willing to trade some Shakespeare in for the more relevant Updike.

Rabbit at Rest is the final volume of the four-book series. The novels follow former-high-school basketball star Rabbit Angstrom as he moves through the 50's , 60's, 70's and 80's, each book taking one decade. Rabbit is a sort of everyman, a product of his times. With the shift of American society, Rabbit shifts too.

Rabbit at Rest takes place in the 80's, with the end of Reagan administration and Bush Senior taking office. Rabbit finally starts feeling like a relic. He's in his 50's and having serious heart problems. His illness and decline is paired with what he sees as the same decline of America. AIDS and the drug war are in the news, and he fears in his own family. His son Nelson is now an adult (sorta) and has taken over Springer Motors - Rabbit's wife's inherited car lot. Rabbit at Rest is largely about Rabbit and Nelson's relationship. All the trauma Rabbit has visited upon his son comes to the forefront as Nelson struggles with drug addiction while trying to raise a family and run a business - none of which he does very well.

Concluding a series like Updike's must be a difficult job. Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (also reviewed on this blog) did the same thing, and I think did it better. Updike's ending is clean, whereas Roth's is frayed. Rabbit's heart problems are neater and easier to deal with that Nathan Zuckerman's prostate cancer. Updike gives a sanitized version of decay, his protagonist doesn't suffer from impotence like Roth's, but instead deals with his continuing libido - and not very well.

Although the final installment of the Rabbit series is my least favorite of the four, it gives the reader a depiction of the 80's in suburban America, instead of the high-flying Wall Street version that's usually portrayed. It's a strong and solid novel that ends one of the better modern narratives, something people who lived it will remember, and those of us who didn't can imagine.

Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

By Ivan Turgenev

According to his Wikipedia entry, Nabokov thought Turgenev was the 4th-best Russian author (above Dostoevsky) and he has the the largest recorded brain-weight. For these reasons alone I wanted to read his best-regarded novel.

Fathers and Sons is about two sets of pre-revolutionary Russian fathers and sons and their ideas about life and society. The new generation's philosophical nihilism is pitted against their fathers' traditional (albeit modernizing) beliefs.

I was surprised how much the character depictions and conflicts remain relevant to this day. It's definitely a good read for radical sons and liberal fathers. It teaches us that our kitchen-table arguments aren't that original. (Dad, I swear I just call you a fascist sometimes because it pisses you off).

The novel also deals with reconciling philosophical dogmas with the reality of human feelings and desires. Can a doctrine like nihilism overthrow the desire for family and love?

The depictions of college-age radicals is right on. They're not portrayed as petulant or dumb, but still in the process of solidifying their beliefs. The adults aren't condescending but are legitimately afraid of the generational shift. The parents also aren't aristocratic autocrats, but rather good-hearted men trying to keep up with changing times. Their interactions have a very realistic nuance.

Tom Stoppard seems to have stolen a lot of Turgenev's ideas in his Coast of Utopia play trilogy. Yet he lacks Turgenev's sympathy for the young men. Stoppard sees them as arbitrary and immature while Turgenev sees that they're bright and forward-looking, if not fully clear on their complete philosophies. The conflict and writing are both engaging and it's a quick read. I generally trust a guy smart enough to write Lolita in his third language, and he didn't let me down.