She and I: A Fugue

Truth

Literature holds some passages that as a result of over-exposure are immortal but mundane, in the same sense that the Mona Lisa is both of these things: If we peer very, very intently, we can discern the original glimmer of beauty or truth that destined it for agelessness, but otherwise, it’s just a thing on the wall.

John Keats’ most famous lines of poetry — ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know'”, and the poem in which the lines are found, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, address this very notion but ironically have, themselves, long ago faded into the wallpaper. Nonetheless, the lines came back to me for the first time since Freshman English, and with a renewed force, as I struggled to understand why I rather liked an oddly written new memoir called She and I: A Fugue and why I so loathed another book, somewhat better-written and vastly better-selling, that I coincidentally happened to be reading at the same time.

Let us begin with the object of my abhorrence. I’m a fan of crime fiction and mysteries, which I tend to read in parallel with the books — lately, mostly memoirs — that I review. I’ve worked my way through most of Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, A.C. Doyle, and Dashiell Hammett, and have recently become a fan of Richard Price, Ruth Rendell, Michael Connelly, Lawrence Block, and Peter Hoeg, among others. All of course are very different from one another, but none, whether they lean more toward the “crime” side or the “mystery” side of the spectrum, can be accused of shying away from the turbid depths of the human spirit. So when I opened a debut mystery novel called Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn, the chief TV critic at Entertainment Weekly, I wasn’t expecting a walk on the mild side.

Nor was I surprised that the protagonist was a deeply disturbed human being who is “dogged by her own demons”, as the publicity material puts it, and carves words like “wicked” and “babydoll” and “icebox” into the hidden parts of her flesh with a blade. After all, the days when the hero of a crime or mystery novel was merely a puttering eccentric like Miss Marple or Poirot or Nero Wolfe are far in the past, and it has become virtually de rigueur, and probably not all that inaccurate, for contemporary investigators to be former drug addicts, or imperfectly reformed alcoholics or, in one way or another, deeply miserable human beings who have to struggle to make it through the day. (I have to admit, however, that the “icebox” was an anachronistic head-scratcher; why doesn’t she slash “Victrola” or “velocipede” into her inner thighs while she’s at it?)

But Flynn takes this relatively recent stereotype and plows it into the muck. It isn’t so much that her “heroine”, a Chicago newspaper reporter named Camille Preaker who returns to her home town of Wind Gap, Missouri to investigate some vicious (needless to say) child murders, is a cutter; that subculture has invaded even our junior high schools these days. No, the issue is that Preaker has figuratively slashed her eyes and her soul as well as her flesh, causing her — and thus, the unfortunate reader — to see all of the human beings she encounters as if they’ve been painted by those masters of disgust, Francis Bacon and Ivan Albright, and then drizzled with rancid grease for good measure.

And that’s all of the characters, not just the ones who murder little girls.

Here are a few of Preaker’s portraits of the non-murdering residents of the small town in Missouri where she was raised:

“I turned to see one of my mother’s friends, Jackie O’Neele (nee O’Keefe) who’d clearly just had a facelift. Here eyes were still puffy and her face was moist and red and stretched, as if she was an angry baby squeezing out of the womb.”

“Angie Papermaker (nee Knightley) looked like she was still battling the bulimia that’d whittled her down in high school — her neck was as thin and ropy as an old woman’s.”

“Jackie purred. She had a melon of a head, covered with overbleached hair, and a leering smile.”

“She smiled leeringly again and clicked her round brown eyes open and shut. She reminded me of a ventriloquist dummy come alive. With hard skin and broken capillaries.”

“I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot at the edge of the sofa.”

“The piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing.”

“The boy next to me, introduced only as Nolan, nodded and wiped sweat off his upper lip. Skinny arms with scabs and a face full of acne. Meth. Missouri is the second-most addicted state in the Union.” (One of a dozen or so slams at Missouri in this book, by the way; can a state sue for libel?)

Worse even than these physical descriptions is the selfish, cowardly, and apathetic way in which the characters (at least as they are seen through Preaker’s blood-rimmed eyes) react to the murders of the little girls, who suffered, among other horrors, the forcible extraction of all of their teeth. Even those girls, after all their suffering, don’t get a break, as if we readers are expected to shrug, too, at their demise; one of the victims had “killed a neighbor’s pet bird with a stick. She’d sharpened it herself with one of her daddy’s hunting knifes.” The other victim? One of the characters says, “Hell, her family moved here two years ago because she stabbed one of her classmates in the eye with a pair of scissors.”

This is, trust me, only a small sampling of what awaits the reader of this book; I gave up on page 91, so overwhelmed was I by the contempt for the characters and the milieu, and so fearful of what horrors lay ahead, as if an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings were to have, in a hidden room in the back, actual flayed and eviscerated lumps of living human flesh on display, rather than merely their two-dimensional representations.

Let me anticipate two objections. Stephen King, for one, writes of far-worse horrors. (And, indeed, he’s one of this book’s enthusiastic blurbers.) But King is a writer of fantasy, not of putatively realistic fiction and, more important, is possessed of genuine humanity and insight into the human condition.

The second possibility is simply that Gillian Flynn has conceived of a hateful character and is employing dramatic irony to depict that character’s sickness. This is undoubtedly true, but also close to being irrelevant, because the point is not that Gillian Flynn is herself a hateful person who sees only ugliness. In fact, Flynn’s author’s portrait on the back cover depicts a very attractive and pleasant-looking woman, and in her author’s acknowledgments she offers “…much love and appreciation to my massive Missouri family — who I’m happy to say were absolutely no inspiration for the characters in this book.” (I suppose this was a nice thing to say, but it reminds me a bit of an Air Force general sending a private warning to a few favored residents of a city before firebombing it.)

So who was, in fact, the “inspiration”, if that is the right word, for this book? My guess? No one who exists or has ever existed on this planet, an intuition that was reinforced by a glimpse into Flynn’s new book, Dark Places, when after gingerly flipping through its pages (I felt like I needed a pair of latex gloves to do so), I almost immediately encountered the same pervasive contempt for humanity.

This second book, which concerns a woman who is the lone survivor of a family massacre, features a different protagonist, so that takes care of the argument that Flynn is merely giving us a glimpse of the world, in Sharp Objects, that one deeply disturbed character might see. Rather, the issue would appear to be that Flynn has a predilection for engaging not with the reality of the world as it is — where most people are complex admixtures of beauty and ugliness — but rather with a melodramatic and decadent version of a crime-novel cliché. Put another way, a novelist is not her characters, but when enough characters are of a certain type, they do begin to define the novelist.

So, part one of Keats’ equation tells me this: When an artist, for reasons of commerce or convention, or because of a lack of inclination or skill, is unable to engage with the truth, and whether she prettifies reality like some mass-market romance novelist or, as in this case, dumps Missouri mud and blood all over it, the result is ugliness all the same.

Beauty

Elephant Eyes (partial) by Jimeye found on Blue Coup.com

Beauty

There has been far too much attention paid in recent years to the issue of falsity in the memoir, and not nearly enough (which is to say, none whatsoever) to the issue of falsity in fiction.

Michael R. Brown’s new memoir, She and I: A Fugue, is stylistically one of the most unusual books you’re ever likely to encounter and that, in itself, will recommend it to a few readers. It isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste and wasn’t much to mine, but Brown does some interesting and even refreshing things with the language on almost every page. The narrative itself is somewhat more conventional — it’s an impressionistic account of Brown’s relationships with the women in his life — but even from this perspective, the book feels refreshing, if only in the tenderness expressed towards the opposite sex. After the misogyny of Flynn’s character (can a woman be a misogynist? Apparently so) it is a pleasure to encounter a worldview in which women are depicted predominantly as physically and spiritually beautiful.

Book: She and I: A Fugue

Author: Michael R. Brown

Publisher: Petrarca Press

Publication Date: May 2009

Length: 281 pages

Format: Paperbaack

Price: $16.95

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/a/antman-sheandi-cover.jpgShe and I, as the title would suggest, is the story of Brown’s love affair with a much-younger ballerina named Mira. The book has its origins in Brown’s widely followed blog, and one of the reasons for the blog’s popularity, it would seem, is the honesty with which Brown depicts his social and sexual relationships with women, including an account of the cruel death by cancer of Brown’s wife, Beth. (Mira came later.) Early in the book, Brown also candidly portrays his childhood sexual exploitation at the hands of an older boy.

Brown is an adherent of Ayn Rand, who had conveyed to Brown, in the pages of Atlas Shrugged, the message that one should “never evade…(so) I forced myself to remember. I tested details for clarity every day. If I found them fuzzy, I sharpened them; if I retracted, I pushed myself forward.” This effort is evident on every page of the book.

So too, for better or worse, is his odd style:

“We went on car-rides, and for brief times troubles weren’t.”

“I hoped my mother’d live to taste her plan-fruits, and that their juice’d be pure and strong and sweet.”

If at times this style makes She and I seem like a self-published simulacrum of a Beat poet’s drug-addled prose, there are other times when Brown’s writing is perfectly pitched to the subject under discussion, as when he employs a staccato, seesawing rhythm to depict the playful back-and-forth of flirtation:

“She suddenly broke in with pantomimed poke and tickle. I knew directly were going to become flirtatious — I pantomimed elbow-nudge, declared tickle fight could be brutal — no prisoners, I warned — she bragged she always won, then admitted more like almost always — I said she was arousing my competitive fires — she laughed, declared she’d still win…”

And there are other points in this book, though in my opinion too few and far between, where Brown demonstrates a strong, straightforward skill at bringing to life on the page the things of this world:

“It was a square hole, a few feet in from the final drop-off, broken by long-ago picks into the solid rock. Then the men of the nineteenth century had poured in concrete and set a massive iron ring wherethrough to run lines from their ships coming in from sea — whether small dinghies or the great ships themselves, I knew not. Thus secured, they had brought to land their reapings from the bodies of whales. The ring was still there, massive, rust-frozen to the iron post coming up from the block, and within the space of the broken hole, clustered in the pool of water ever-freshed by waves, were sea anemones with stretched tendrils, translucent light blue-green in the dark stoned water.”

This is beautiful, both on its own terms and because it, like the rest of this memoir, seems to reflect a small corner of the world’s reality. Unfamiliar maybe, and eccentric, and not necessarily our own reality, which most of us in any event don’t need more of — but it’s somebody’s.

The thing is, there has been far too much attention paid in recent years to the issue of falsity in the memoir, and not nearly enough (which is to say, none whatsoever) to the issue of falsity in fiction. Slapping the word ‘Fiction’ on the cover of a book is not a “get out of jail free” card or, more accurately, a license to kill; a novelist has just as much obligation as does a non-fiction writer to depict the world truthfully and with sympathetic attention to characters’ motivations, and that applies even to fantasy, where archetypal and psychological rules still apply, and science fiction, where the laws of physics must either be explained, or plausibly explained away.

But in a mystery novel, which takes place in a world we all recognize, the obligation is even greater. That doesn’t mean you can’t have contempt for a child-murderer, but if you, as author or character or both, have contempt for everyone else, too, including the victims and their families, then there is no moral significance to a murder, and no satisfaction in bringing the murderer to justice.

I seem to remember from my days in college that the meaning of Keats’ lines were a source of puzzlement to scholars, and there is no question that those lines and the entire poem contain some ambiguities. From my own perspective, however, the coincidental pairing of this brace of books make it very clear what the poet means when he says “truth is beauty”.

Its corollary, that an unwillingness or inability to depict the world truthfully will inevitably result in ugliness, is part two of the equation, and seems equally self-evident to me.