Reading The Making of the President, 1960

I'm currently reading, The Making of the President, 1960. It's excellent so far, but I haven't been devoting enough time to reading this week.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a fictionalized series of stories about his experiences in the Vietnam war. And yet, it's a lot more than that. It's a reflection on life, dreams, death, and above all, storytelling. O'Brien takes care to note that much of "story-truth" which is objectively untrue, is often more reflective of actual events than "happening-truth" which is to say, the perspective of an omniscient narrator. "Story-truth" is a much more human way to approach things because it's how we actually experience the world. For example, when talking about a fellow soldier getting blown up by a booby trapped artillery shell, O'Brien talks about how the actual experience is looking at the soldier, looking away from the blast, looking back at what remains, looking away again, and then coming back to the actual horror of what happened. You get a much more personal feel and experience with "story-truth" than with "happening-truth." "Story truth" isn't some objective truth, but it's true as far as the character in the story, or a person's memory remembers it as truth.

O'Brien's writing is absolutely gripping. The stories are all tied together through his Vietnam experience but range from his current (as of the writing) middle-aged self, to Timmy as a 4th grader. Every story is compelling in it's own way, but what's most impressive is the immediacy of each story. You are there. You are watching Curt Lemon get blown up. You are retrieving his yellow slimy guts from the banyan tree. Moreover, you're stunned by how everything can go from tranquility to horror in just the space of a few words. And a very few words at that.

I've read many books on the Vietnam war: journalistic accounts, oral histories, memoirs, military histories, political histories, you name it. The Things They Carried is exceptional among all these books because O'Brien's facility with the language envelops you into the text. Whether or not you want to be, you're in Vietnam with him. You're at the Canadian border considering dodging the draft. The war, O'Brien's war, becomes your war even if you weren't born yet. The Things They Carried isn't just a book about the Vietnam war; it's a book about what it means to have human emotion and a human psyche. Simply put, this is one of the best books I've read in years, maybe ever. Don't wait. Go read this book right now.

Change to the List

After much consideration, I'm dropping Catch-22 from my reading list. It's one of my favorite books and I've already read it in the neighborhood of 4-5 times. I don't think that there's much to be gained by a re-read at this point in the context of this project. There are plenty of other books out there. In it's place, I'm adding White Noise by Don DeLillo. I've heard plenty of excellent things about DeLillo over the years and yet I've never read any of his work. This novel made Time magazine's list of top novels since 1923 (what Time refers to as all-time). So it's the new addition.

So, the current list"

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (finished Jan. 22)
   
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (finished Feb. 3)
   
3. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
4. All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (finished Feb. 19)
   
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison
6. Deliverance by James Dickey (finished April 1)
   
7. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (finished June 6)
   
8. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (finished May 1)
   
10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (finished March 6)
    
11. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
12. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
13. Candide by Voltaire (finished Feb. 23)
    
14. Don Quixote by Cervantes
15. White Noise by Don DeLillo (finished May 29)
    
16. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
20. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
    
21. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
22. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
    
25. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (finished June 15)
    
26. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
28. Night by Elie Wiesel
    
29. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (finished May 6)
    
30. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
31. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (finished April 13)
    
32. The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward (finished March 27)
    
33. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
35. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (finished April 28)
    
36. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (finished May 22)
    
37. (placeholder)

The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain...father to generations of hack noir writers. Perhaps I just hate the genre, the "hardboiled" style (yes, I really dislike Hammett too), but I really didn't like this book at all. I finished it yesterday morning before work and then took some time to try to figure out why The Postman Always Rings Twice book rang in toward the end of Modern Library's list of the top 100 20th C. novels. Apparently it made the list because this 1934 novel gave birth to the noir genre of the "hardboiled" style. Which is to say, it's a gritty, earthy, drama where the protagonist isn't a private eye, but rather a victim, perpetrator, or accomplice to a crime. Why this is a good thing, I'm still not sure.

Anyhoo, TPART is the story of a cagey drifter (yup, a new cardboard archetype), a "dame," and her decently well-off husband who she was never really in love with. Guess what? Surprise, surprise...the drifter and the dame fall in a bizarre kind of "love" and try to off the husband to get his money and collect on the insurance. Sound familiar? Yeah, because billions of hacks have been writing this crap ever since and it never gets any better in the re-telling. The drifter, Frank Chambers, can best be described as a cunning (but not smart), brutal thug with no redeeming qualities. Really...none. He's the main character and I kept hoping that bad things would happen to him. Crowbar to the crotch maybe. Something like that. If it's possible, Cora, the "dame," is even worse because she's brick-wall stupid to boot. Her husband, the Greek, is just boring. You don't like him, you don't dislike him, you just feel bad for him that these to yay-hoos are trying to kill him. So this short book has it all: murder, blackmail, domestic violence, car crashes, possible rape, lawyers, plot twists...everything except characters that you can remotely give two shits about. And that to me, along with giving future hacks 2 dimensional characters to work with, makes TPART a monument to suckitude.

I will say this for Cain, blessedly, the book was slim. He didn't waste words and the plot was fast-paced. Thank heaven for that, because I don't thing I could have spent 10 more minutes with that book. Easily the worst book on this list that I've read so far.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

On Monday, the 28th, I finished Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. "Bell" is, on the surface, a book about three days in the life of a band of anti-fascist guerrillas during the Spanish Civil War. More than that though, the book is an exploration of what complex creatures human beings are. Even good people are capable of doing ghastly things, given certain circumstances. Moreover, the book examines the motivations of many characters and you get a real feeling for why they're fighting in the civil war, even though they were never trained soldiers.

The main character is Robert Jordan, an American university instructor who has come to Spain to fight against the fascists. Even if one wanted to forget Robert Jordan's name, it would be impossible, since Hemingway writes out Robert Jordan's name in full on nearly every page of the book. It's my biggest criticism of the book, but realize that this is minor. But I digress. Jordan's experience in the civil war is as a dynamiter. As such, he's sent by the communist (anti-fascist) General Staff behind the fascist lines to meet up with a guerrilla band led by a man named Pablo. Jordan's orders though, essentially send the band on a suicide mission to blow up a bridge at the start of a Republic offensive. From here, we learn how Jordan reconciles placing himself and these other people (who, for the most part, he likes very much) in mortal danger for a "greater cause." We also learn how many of the band found themselves in this situation and why they fight. Jordan does have a romantic interest, which at first I thought was trite, but then I realized that it was important for Jordan to have more at stake than just himself and his life. For the story to have greater weight, he had to be willing to sacrifice the life of someone he loved.

We also learn how bureaucracy, petty politics, and general incompetence put all of the guerrilla band in danger (in some cases more than danger). Fighting for ideology, fighting for your home, fighting for your government, fighting for murdered friends and family, fighting for the Spanish people...all seem to be legitimate reasons to be engaged in the civil war, but they all come with a terrible cost.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Hemingway devoted several pages to the story of how Robert Jordan's father killed himself with a pistol. Considering that Hemingway was later a gunshot suicide, I wonder if he thought about suicide for much of his life.

Hemingway's main characters seem extremely "real." Perhaps it's because his dialogue was so good. He interspersed Spanish into the English text and it really seemed to bring the characters to life. Also, his descriptions of the forested mountain territory of Spain really placed you, the reader, in the action. The occasional change of point-of-view from a Jordan to an omniscient narrator to another character and then back to Jordan was sometimes jarring, but in all it gave a more complete picture of the situation the characters found themselves, and thus benefited the story. In sum, it's abundantly clear to me why For Whom the Bell Tolls is considered an American classic.

Confederacy of Dunces

So I finished Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole last night. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I was expecting big things and all I got was an ok book. Pulitzer Prize, Shmulitzer Prize, says I.

Dunces chronicles a few turbulent weeks in the life of Ignatius J. Reilly, jobless medieval scholar who lives in his tiny room in his mother's tiny house. It should be mentioned that Ignatius' great intelligence is only matched by his enormous physical bulk, complete disdain for others, enhanced self-opinion, and unmatched hypochondria. Due to a series of odd circumstances, Ignatius finds himself having to look for a job in his home town of New Orleans. Toole takes us from job to job, introducing us to fabulously weird characters whose lives all seem to be intertwined at the end, mainly because of Ignatius' fabulous failures.

Ignatius, while the main character, is not a sympathetic character. Funny to laugh at, yes, but not funny. I don't think he can even be properly termed an anti-hero. The other characters are spectacularly unique, especially Burma Jones. The character studies of Ignatius and Jones are the real strengths of this book. Sure it's got some funny moments, but I didn't find it riotously funny like many of the critics did. The dialogue is also a strong point of the book. The characters really do "sound" like "real people." I find that this is often very difficult for writers to master and Toole does an excellent job of it.

Despite the strengths mentioned above, I didn't find the story all that funny or compelling. Certainly there were funny scenes, but the book wasn't all that funny. I didn't want anything good or bad to happen to Ignatius, I just wanted him to go away. Less Ignatius and more Burma Jones would have made for a better book. The multiple characters all crossing paths at one time or another is always a fun trope, but I've seen it done a lot better in other works.

Of course part of the book's cachet is the tragic circumstances of its publishing. Toole had been deceased, a suicide, long before the novel was ever published. His mother found the manuscript and sent it to the Dean of Southern Literature, Walker Percy. Percy loved the book and got it published. Indeed, it's sad that Toole couldn't have lived to see his work gain accolades. Dunces is certainly a good read, but in no way would I consider it a classic.

Deliverance by James Dickey

Let me start off by saying that I've seen the movie Deliverance a few times, and it certainly burns in one's memory. I don't know how one can ever forget the scene of Ned Beatty being raped by vicious hillbillies. Rough stuff. On to the book.

Deliverance details the canoeing trip of 4 upper middle-class Atlanta men. Seemingly a dull idea for a book (the anomie of the middle class, yadda, yadda, yadda), James Dickey turns it into a magnificent story. The men of the book, Ed Gentry (our narrator), Lewis, Bobby, and Drew, are all fairly well off friends who at Lewis's urging, decide to go on a canoe trip on a wild river in rural north Georgia. At least from Ed's perspective, he needs to find something different and break away for a while from the mundane office life and do something different. One can assume that the others feel the same way. So our intrepid canoeists head to the river...and everything goes wrong.

They start by meeting rough and tumble hayseed-types who they're make fun of and talk down to, yet at the same time are afraid of. And it's clear that the country folk don't like these city slickers very much at all. Once they get the canoes in the river, it's clear that most of the main characters don't know what they're doing and have no business being on such a difficult river. Other problems erupt when they come across a couple of armed hillbillies. Suffice it to say that things go very poorly for at least one of the members of the group. To say much more about the plot would be to give away what makes this book great: the story.

Dickey gives us a story of man versus nature and man versus his primal self. He makes us examine what getting back to nature really means. Should one even want to go back to nature? While she's beautiful, Mother Nature is heartless as well. On the other hand, Dickey explains the exhilaration of living life so on the edge and so in the moment. The story is so incredibly compelling that it's very hard to put the book down. No doubt this is an American Classic.