The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

I got a little behind because I got a good recommendation on reading Generation Kill by Evan Wright. Wright was embedded with the First Recon Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Excellent book.

But back to the task at hand. Stephen Crane...now this guy could write. The Red Badge of Courage is a short book, but big on action and big on consideration of the mind of someone going to war. The main character, Henry Fleming, is a New York farm boy who joins up with the Union army with visions of glory dancing through his head. At first, he finds that there isn't much fighting to do; it's mostly sitting around camp, eating bad food, and practicing marching drills. But soon enough, his regiment is called into battle. In the first encounter with the enemy, Henry fires his rifle, but soon turns and runs. He's disgusted with himself, but he rationalizes his flight from battle. More than anything, he fears returning to his unit because he doesn't want to be known as a coward. He wanders around the rear of the lines and hooks up with injured soldiers heading back to hospital camps. He's envious of the wounded men, because their wounds serve as a "red badge of courage." After hassling one of the men, Fleming is struck by a rifle butt and cut on the head. When he gets back to camp, he then has a reason for why he left his unit, he says he was grazed by a bullet. And somehow, this wound does give Fleming courage. In the future battles, he's an absolute lion, leading the charge and carrying the flag. After these encounters, he feels that he has truly become a man.

To say that Stephen Crane was an excellent writer is an understatement. The story is gripping. From describing the boredom and rumor-mongering of camp life, to the confusion of battle, Crane puts you in the action. What's more, you feel compelled to continue reading the book...a literal page-turner. The best writing is the frenzy and chaos of battle. The soldiers weren't always sure of why they were attacking an area or why the couldn't retreat to a better position. In modern terms, they didn't have a wide situational awareness. We learn of this when Fleming is out looking for water and he overhears a general giving orders. The general has the wider view of the battle, but in Crane's words, he speaks of Fleming's unit as no more than a "broom." The regiment, to the general, is just a tool to be used to do a job. It's not a group of men who are fighting and dying. In another scene, the unit is trying to retreat, but in the confusion of battle, compounded by the smoke and noise of battle, they don't know which way is the actual way to retreat.

Harder to describe is how Crane puts you into Fleming's thought processes. He gives insight into Fleming's thoughts and emotions during all phases of the story. His boredom in camp; his thoughts on first being fired upon; his fear and flight from battle; his fear of cowardice; and his nearly insane rage and bravery in the later encounters with the enemy.

The Red Badge of Courage is truly a great American book.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I actually finished this book back on Monday the 16th and I've been trying to come up with something to say ever since. I mean, it's Alice in Wonderland. What can really be said. Well, it's pretty trippy, that's for sure. Alice had to be high, dreaming, or madder than either the Mad Hatter or the March Hare.

I will say that the edition I read was The Annotated Alice with notes by Martin Gardner. This definitely made for a better reading experience for an adult. Gardner points out many of the finer points and subtleties of Carroll's work. Particularly of interest are the mathematical games and wordplay that Carroll intersperses throughout the text. Given the addition of the notes to the text and that I'm a sucker for puns, Alice is still pretty good.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Ok, so we're in England in the late 19th Century. Victorianism is at its height. And Oscar Wilde gives us The Picture of Dorian Gray. On the surface the story is about a beautiful young man of the upper classes who is having his portrait painted by a fawning artist. With a wish, Dorian Gray, the youth being painted, gains immortality in the painting. His aging and his experiences (mostly sins) will be reflected in the portrait but not in Dorian's flesh. So Dorian goes through his life living a "new Hedonism" and leaving a wake of corruption and sin. The portrait, which Dorian keeps locked away, continues to become uglier and more marred with each corruption. After many more terrible things happen due to Dorian's actions, keeping the secret of the portrait, and moreover, living with the visible corruption of his soul finally overtakes him.

So what we have is a morality tale that could have probably been told in 50 pages. Instead, the edition I have runs over 220. Why? Many, many excursions into what the upper class in England at the time cared about and how these were shallow preoccupations. Also, it gave Wilde many opportunities to impress the reader with clever epigrams and witticisms. It didn't impress me as much as it did make me wish he'd get on with the story.

Other than making oblique references to homosexuality at the height of the Victorian Era, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Not a bad novel, in my opinion, but I truly don't understand its enduring appeal.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe takes us into the world of mid-1980s New York City. The primary character is Sherman McCoy, millon-dollar income bond salesman on Wall Street. We learn about McCoy's patrician upbringing, going to all the right prep schools and then off to Yale all under the careful watch of his high-powered lawyer father who is an aristocrat's aristocrat. McCoy's life falls apart however, due to an affair with another married wealthy socialite. McCoy and his mistress get lost in the Bronx and come upon a makeshift roadblock. In an attempt to get away from two young black men, a scuffle ensues, the mistress takes the wheel and as they speed off, one of the young men, Harold Lamb, is hit by the back of the car. McCoy and his mistress decide not to talk to the police, but rather just to proceed as if nothing had happen.

And then we get to the real story. A Reverend Bacon (unmistakably Al Sharpton), intervenes with on behalf of Lamb's mother. Then Wolfe reveals to us how race, the media, trumped up public demonstrations, politicians, and other forces all work to pervert the truth and subvert the justice system. Undoubtedly McCoy was negligent at some level and it turns out that Henry Lamb was no mugger, but McCoy wasn't the villain. It's hard to feel bad for him...hell, it's hard to feel bad for nearly any character in the novel, but he doesn't deserve what happens to him. As to that, I'll leave it to you to read the book.

Wolfe's characterizations are, frankly, as deep and fleshed out as those developed by Charles Dickens and John Irving. It makes the novel longer, but it makes the novel oh-so-good. You feel you understand the motivations and all-too-human frailties of the characters. The plot ends with a rather contrived tool, but in all still an excellent book. As it is a snapshot of a period in time, I don't know that it will hold up over the years, but it's an excellent novel and one I should have read years ago.

As a quick aside, you can tell that Wolfe has no love of highbrow law firms. I loved it every time he mentioned McCoy's father's firm: Dunning, Sponget, & Leach. Really funny stuff. Just as good is another firm that had an unimportant role in the book: Curry, Goad, & Pesterall. Quality!

White Noise by Don DeLillo

I actually finished White Noise by Don DeLillo last Thursday, May 29th while I was on vacation in Memphis, Tennessee. So this post is a little late.

Published in 1985, White Noise is an indictment of how media saturation, information overload, quackery, fear of death, fractured families, and most of all, consumerism rule the day in late-20th Century America. I can only wonder if DeLillo imagined that it would get worse with the Internet, satellite radio, and the vast expansion of cable and satellite television. It's rather amazing that we can function at all in the modern environment.

Nominally, the novel is about Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at a university. Yep, Hitler studies. Gladney invented it. The book follows Gladney, his third (fourth?) wife Babette, their children together and from previous marriages. Largely, the book demonstrates how we are overwhelmed by the information saturation of daily life and that we are only jarred out of it through true crisis. It takes a significant, perhaps catastrophic event to cut through the incessant white noise. In this instance it was a "toxic airborne event." (actually other events too, but they were more personal to the characters.) A chemical spill caused the toxic airborne event. This served to show that people really only care about the horrors of TV whenever they're actually involved in them. But in the great post-modernist tradition, the people seemed to hate it when their tragic event wasn't given enough air time. One of the high points of the writing for me was DeLillo's interjection of fragments of dialogue from the TV into the text. These interjections were apropos of nothing. Often they were product names. All of which made it seem almost too real. I couldn't count the number of times I've been talking to someone in the room or on the phone and you get distracted by something said or viewed on the television (or someone else in the room involved in another conversation).

From there the book truly damns the "better living through chemistry" pharmacological society. A pill is created that may or may not eliminate the fear of death. DeLillo poses the question from there as to whether life is worth living without the fear of death. Do things still have value when you don't know that you're going to lose them someday with Death?

Of all the books I've written about so far, I'm really not giving this one the best treatment. It's very difficult to summarize the book without giving anything important away. So I figure it's better to leave it brief and incomplete rather than to possibly spoil anything.

In relation to all the other books so far, this novel made me think harder than any of the others. It really speaks to some of the fundamental questions of living in today's society. I imagine that I should read the book again in a year or two to see if anything new pops out at me. As it was, I found this to be a magnificent book that definitely should be part of the canon of great literature. I'm very surprised that I haven't heard more about this book. While I still think All the King's Men is probably still the top of the heap for me, White Noise is a close second.