An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser) (8.7/10.0)

Don’t you all miss the days when it seemed that every great artist was an unabashed socialist? Ok, so maybe I don’t actually remember those days at all, but I sometimes feel like I lived for brief periods in the dark worlds of corrupt American capitalism painted by Dreiser, Steinbeck, and even Hemingway (oh, heck, let’s through Kerouac in there too), among many others. Don’t you? I have this purely romanticized vision of the turn of the twentieth century and the years that followed as a battleground of ideologies when it seemed like a system that valued human relationships (as opposed to supply and demand) might actually raise the human race to another evolutionary level. Of course, the intervening years have largely proven that dream to be just that—a dream—devoid of any grounding in human nature. But I like to reminisce in any case. Ah, those were the (completely nonexistent) days ...

No one, and I mean no one, is better at painting a straightforward tale of the evil influences of American capitalism than Theodore Dreiser. He’s like the Brothers Grimm of the American working classes or like the Dr. Suess of anti-capitalist ideology—except that the Cat in the Hat wears a bushy mustache and carries a hammer and sickle. Though 25 years separate them, Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925) are almost mirror images of each other as they treat the effect of unbridled American ambition on first women and then men, who grow up in Darwinistic America devoid (individually or collectively) of any strong moral compass. The fact that Dreiser’s novels continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century is a testament to his ability to find universal and enduring themes.

An American Tragedy was based upon well-publicized actual events in upstate New York in 1906. Here’s the short, short version of the story: upwardly-mobile boy from a solid family takes advantage of country girl; aristocratic third-party female then expresses interest in boy; boy dumps country girl for a chance at the good life; but country girl is pregnant; boy thinks, “what to do ... I know ... murder,” or is it? Maybe it was just an accident.  I will say that in the actual events, the boy was convicted of murder and executed by electric chair. But you’ll have to read the book itself to find out what happens to his on-page persona, Clyde Griffiths.

This is one of a very few books that I have re-read over the course of my life. And usually I find that my understanding of the story has changed in the interim. Not so here. Dreiser is forever an idealist and an advocate for the redemptive power of empathy. Though his dream seems further away now than ever, it is still undeniably enjoyable to inhabit that world for a week or two. Give it a shot ...

Some Folks Like to Get Away, Take a Holiday from the Neighborhood, HOP a Flight to Miami Beach or to Hollywood ...

Ok.  That was a stretch, but it's slim pickins on the hop-related puns this morning.  It was either Billy Joel or Cyndi Lauper (I hop, you hop, we hop ...).  I do live in Miami Beach, and I think we can all agree that Billy Joel was the better choice in any case.

It's Friday again (where does the time go?  No, seriously, where does it go?  I only managed one measly post again this week--though it WAS a juicy addition), and that means that Crazy for Books is doing the book blogger hop all weekend long.  The cover is only $10 (send c/o The Literate Man in Miami), and I've been told that the band comes on at around 10.  So dive right in, check out all the excellent work being done around the world by your fellow lit-bloggers and leave a comment here and there to give them the attention that they so desperately crave props that they all deserve.

Jennifer's question this week is what book are you dying to get your hands on.  I'm going with that Book of Kells that sits in Trinity College in Dublin - that's got to be worth a pretty penny, right?  If anyone wants to send it along, I will happily split the cover money that I receive from this week's Hop.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (John le Carré) (8.5/10.0)

You’d have to be a product of Generation Y not to love a good old Cold War spy story. No matter how many times I see or hear or read it, the ideological conflict as presented in the form of a dour-faced, steroid-pumping, muscle-bound Russki versus a hard-scrabble, street-smart, freedom-loving American is enough to bring back memories of bomb drills at school, a vision of Reagan declaring the Great Satan, and those epic Celtics/Lakers battles that defined a decade. All of us here at The Literate Man freely admit that we still pause in our channel surfing to watch long scenes (which we all know by heart) of Rocky IV, Red October, and Red Dawn, among others. Ah ... those were the days when gas was cheap and you knew who your enemies were or, more importantly, where your enemies were. It seems so long ago now.


What was I talking about again? Oh right, the novel. Sorry about that, I got lost in Cold War reverie.

So, I picked up my first le Carré novel, Absolute Friends, in the Frankfurt Airport on return from a visit to the former East Germany and the Czech Republic in, oh say, 2004. The novel chronicles the Cold War relationship of Mundy and Sasha, who work together to help MI6 bring down East Germany and eventually find themselves betrayed by the forces of globalization, which (as products of the Cold War, like me) they never fully understand. It was a very enjoyable book, and I made a mental note to pick up more le Carré as I was able. I saw the film adaptation of The Constant Gardner and I read Mission Song, both of which I enjoyed, though neither as much as Absolute Friends. And so, when my mother sent along a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (thanks, Mom!), I thought it would be an enjoyable read and a trip down memory lane along the lines of what occurs when I watch any of the aforementioned Cold War movies.

I. WAS. BLOWN. AWAY. It was like I was that high-tech PPSI punch-measuring machine at the end of the Ivan Drago training montage in Rocky IV. This is—bar none—the best Cold War spy story we have ever heard, seen, or read. And I now understand why it was named one of Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Novels. Ok, so about the story. It’s dark ... and I mean depths-of-the-human-soul dark, German winter solstice dark, Vito Corleone’s office dark, well ... you get the idea. Alec Leamas heads up the West Berlin office of the British Secret Service (known as the Circus), until his best double agent is killed, his leadership comes under severe scrutiny, and he is recalled to London. Then, in the Cold War espionage equivalent of a last-second, Hail Mary pass into the end zone, Leamas is fired, sent to jail, and hung out for defection like a slab of beef set dangling from the roof of a den of wolves (sound familiar, The Departed?). Anyway, the bait is taken, the trap sprung, and Leamas goes over the wall to East Germany, leaving the lovely (love interest) Liz behind with instructions not to try to follow him. His mission? To frame his counterpart, the East German Muntz, as a double-agent for the British.

I’d give you the rest of the story, but then there’d be no point in you reading it. And you need to read it. The plot is exquisitely crafted, with twists and turns aplenty, but it is the psychological realism in the context of counter-espionage that sets the book apart from anything I have ever read on the subject. Le Carré does an excellent job of describing the amorality practiced on both sides of the Berlin Wall (and the English Channel) in the name of idealism. My advice? Turn off that rerun of The Hunt for Red October (as good as it is—I love Sean Connery as a Russki, I don’t care what his accent is) and get your hands on a copy of this book. Do it now, comrade.

I Hop (Lawyer's Note: The Literate Man has no affiliation direct or otherwise with the International House of Pancakes)

Is it Friday already?  So it is, which means that the Book Blogger Hop is goin' on over at Crazy for Books.  There's an astonishing number of great book-related blogs out there.  So head on over to the site, take a look around, do the hop, and help get the word out about The Literate Man.

 
A brief note to all the Literati--apologies for the lack of quantity this week.  My caseload has me seriously underwater at the moment.  But what we lack in numbers, we more than made up for in quality.  Read Sometimes a Great Notion ... seriously ... you'll thank me for it.

Also, while potentially anti-literary, you're all invited to stay with me in South Beach to experience the Miami Heat taking the next five NBA Finals in a row. 

Sometimes a Great Notion (Ken Kesey) (10.0/10.0)

That this greatest work of iconic, if underappreciated, American author Ken Kesey is not more widely read is, we consider, one of the great tragedies of modern American literary culture. Kesey is generally best known for his groundbreaking 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and his role as the leader of the cross country- and LSD-tripping Merry Pranksters, whose exploits were famously chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both are excellent works and well worth a read, especially if you have interest in either the Beat Generation (whose individualistic ideals and perspective Kesey largely inherited) or the drug-fueled love-fest of West Coast America in the 1960’s and 70’s. But any lover of great literature, particularly great American literature, and particularly particularly great male American literature, is doing himself a serious disservice by ignoring what is undoubtedly Kesey’s greatest work, Sometimes a Great Notion.

The novel chronicles the Stamper family of Oregon, whose fiercely-independent and hard-scrabble life is played out among the teeming, danger-filled forests that they log and on the banks of the Wakonda River, whose waters have eroded the land about the Stamper family home to the point that the live on a virtual island. Like the setting, the characters are well-drawn and endlessly interesting, from the half-crazed patriarch, Henry Stamper, to the physically brutal but dependable eldest son, Hank Stamper, to the patient loyalty and creeping desire of Hank’s wife, Vivian Stamper, to the softer intellectual person of Leland Stamper, the estranged half-brother of Hank who returns to the family logging business just as the Stampers stand off against powerful union interests, which demand that the family shut down operations to support an ongoing loggers strike.

But it is not just the compelling story of rugged individualism and fierce family loyalty that makes this perhaps the greatest novel ever written in American Literature (and we say perhaps only because we have not read them all). Kesey also innovates in style, using a technique of multiple first-person, stream of consciousness accounts of thought and action to bring the gritty characters to life. The points of view move from person to person furiously over the course of a single page and the reader can imagine the 72-hour amphetamine-fueled stints that Kesey admitted to in his writing of it. Whatever your criticisms of his technique, the effect is pure artistry—a symphony of action and emotion that builds to a crescendo that pits the Stamper family against all the arrayed forces of man and nature.

We have no problem placing this book at the top of our list of books for men and recommend it above all others for its incredible story and innovative style.

Doin' the Hop

It's time for the Book Blogger Hop once again.  This time, Jennifer over at Crazy for Books has asked all of us bloggers to give our names and explain a little about how we got started in the biz.  Ok, so I'm Patrick and I'm addicted to books (Hi, Patrick).  As for how we got started, I'm reposting from an interview that we did over at Australian book blog Page Turners not so long ago. 

"We’re new kids on the block, having started this past March, but we’re in it for the long haul. As for the reason why, a National Public Radio story some years back determined that only 20% of fiction readers (in the US, UK, and Canada) were men. I’d be shocked if the number were higher in Australia. Not only do I think that this is a tragedy for men on an individual level (as I said above, I think fiction allows us to understand ourselves and one another), but it is a tragedy for society at large where a little empathy and understanding can sometimes make all the difference between uninformed violence and informed compassion. There is a real debate over whether the fiction-reading gap is due to a genuine lack of interest in reading on the part of men or a result of the heavy marketing dollars that are poured into romance and young adult novels based around female characters (the so-called “chick lit”). I tend to think that it’s is a combination of the two, but I do think that the publishing industry bears some responsibility for the actual state of affairs. Hopefully, with the continued development of reading technologies (an area in which men are definitely interested), that will begin to change. In any case, we at 'The Literate Man' want to do our small part to get men reading again."

And that's us in a nutshell.  Come on in, take a look around, take off your coat (it's summer down here in Miami, after all), have a seat, put your feet up, and settle in for a good read.  Oh yeah--and leave a comment--we want to hear from you!

A Declaration of War on All Things Twilight

I tried to read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I really did. I am conscious of the many historical instances in which the seemingly unredeemable popular work of the day—championed by the great unwashed masses, but ridiculed by the literati—later became a pillar of English or American Literature. And so, I very consciously refrain from judging a work before I actually read it for myself and, in all likelihood, determine that it is not, in fact, so much trash, but just another in a long line of additions to English or American pop culture that is mildly entertaining and, perhaps, of latent artistic value to be recognized in some far off date when our children seek to define the age gone by. But fifty pages of Twilight revealed the issue to me in stark detail: we have finally become a nation of literary panderers. For every Cormac McCarthy, there are a dozen Stephenie Meyers who direct the focus of American literary endeavor to the very lowest common denominator. And I, for one, will not watch the ship of American literature founder and sink without at least trying to plug the leak and bail.


There are many arguments to be made against the story of Twilight itself, which anyone who has not been living in a cave for the past decade knows whether they’ve read the book or not. It’s decidedly unoriginal—both Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris did vampires better. It’s also decidedly creepy—the story of a man 109-year old man having an affair with a 17-year old high school girl. Not since Nabokov’s Lolita has a story so successfully cashed in on society’s prurient interest in young girls. And it unabashedly perpetuates the princess myth, wherein the helpless young girl is unable to defend herself against the terrible forces of this world and must seek the protection of the impossibly strong, handsome, and wealthy man that will, of course, dedicate his life to her safety and happiness. That literally millions of young girls around the world are being raised to think that this is an acceptable framework through which to see the world is more our failing as a society than Stephenie Meyers’ as a creative artist.

But none of this is surprising or even particularly bothersome to me. I am sufficiently jaded by popular American culture at this point that lousy, recycled stories roll off my back like so much water off a duck. What does bother me is the scale upon which Twilight has been adopted by and incorporated into American culture and the resulting shift of our collective focus toward those stories that present an airbrushed (if not wholly animated) depiction of American life in a series of clichéd cliffhangers and caricatures while eschewing (or at least relegating to a distant secondary status) any story that accurately depicts the joys and the hardships of this life and the emotional struggles that realistic characters endure in order to survive within it. I genuinely fear that the overriding popularity of Twilight has finally pushed us irrevocably into the category of slack-jawed cartoon watchers, with no interest in stories with organic meaning for our condition as human beings, stories that make us think, stories that make us consider other points of view or strive to be better, or at lease stories that involve an original thought.

And so, somewhat surprisingly, I feel that I owe Stephenie Meyers a personal debt of gratitude. Twilight was, to me, a boot to the head. I can now see the dark night about me, but I refuse to go quietly into it. I am awake, and I recognize that, in order to find those stories that I treasure—stories by which we collectively define and experience the many beautiful variations on the human condition—I must trade Twilight for The Long River Home, Penguin Books for Pushcart, the Oscars for the Independent Spirit Awards, Blockbuster for Netflix, and Amazon for the local library. I must refuse the dry pellets of food poured in my feed bowl and instead beg from the table, because that is where the nutrition lies.
And so, The Literate Man hereby declares war on all things Twilight. I would ask you to join us by making conscious decisions about where your entertainment dollars (and those of your children) are being spent. Rather than dripping amorphously into the jellied mass of the lowest common denominator, let us try to raise it up, slap it around, and help it to recognize that genuine meaning can still be found in literature, if only we are willing to look for it.