Category: Books

The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, is a compelling and ultimately poignant coming-of-age story. Oh yes,and it’s also a weird fantasy novel. We follow the protagonist, Sam, and his friends from age four until they graduate from high school. The time is the 1960s, the place a working-class British town in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We get many of the usual, as well as some highly unusual, heterosexual-male childhood and adolescent traumas, having to do with parents and friends and authority and school and masturbation and girls and drugs; but we also get something more, because Sam is haunted by the Tooth Fairy, a foul-mouthed gender-shifter who originally appears to collect a fallen-out baby tooth, but keeps on coming back, insinuating to Sam, seducing him, repelling him, messing with his life, causing tragedies in all the people about him, and generally tormenting and obsessing him far beyond what his actual situation would seem to call for. Joyce leaves it an open question to what extent we should regard this apparition as “real,” and to what extent we can see it as just a kind of psychological projection. But the presence of the Tooth Fairy transfigures this otherwise more-or-less naturalistic story, giving it a haunting intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with the putrid, pseudo-poetic nostalgia that so often ruins adult reminiscences of childhood and adolescence. Instead, Joyce achieves the effect of a primordial beauty and terror amidst what is otherwise , and simultaneously, quotidian banality.

Norman Spinrad‘s 1969 SF novel Bug Jack Barron has its roots in the Sixties, when it was written, but deals with issues that are still relevant today: the power of the media, the power of drugs, what it means to “sell out” (and how it’s impossible not to), race relations, the quest for power, and the quest for immortality. The protagonist, Jack Barron, is a former “Berkeley baby Bolshevik” who has cynically dumped his political ideals in order to become America’s most popular TV personality. But he finds his cynicism and his past idealism both put to the test, when he is sucked into a maelstrom of political intrigue centering on a rich man who controls the secret of human immortality. Certain aspects of the book seem dated: particularly its lame, all-too-typical-of-its-era portrayal of the main female character. But for the most part, Bug Jack Barron is still powerful and relevant, with its Burroughsian insights on the vampiric price of personal immortality (something today’s Transhumanists would do well to keep in mind), and its understanding of media spectacle: “He suddenly realized that to the hundred million people on the other side of the screen, what they saw there was reality, reality that was realer than real because a whole country was sharing the direct sensory experience, it was history taking place right before their eyes, albeit non-event history that existed only on the screen.”

I’ve started reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947). Whitehead, like his almost exact contemporaries Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and John Dewey (1859-1952), was famous and highly esteemed during his lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century, but was almost entirely forgotten during the second half…
Continue reading “Whitehead”

Lucky Wander Boy, by D. B. Weiss, is a smart, funny, and ultimately poignant novel about love and illusion, creativity and commerce, and video game addiction. The twenty-something narrator is obsessed with the (now obsolete) video games of his youth; these games are not only the focus of his passion, but provide a mythical template for his life. The novel itself plays with this as a metafictional conceit, in a way that is totally compelling (rather than, as it could easily have been, corny): the video game as the codification of dream logic, or of the desires, or better, the self-deceptive fantasies, that animate us. Along the way, we get – among other things – disquisitions on the Gnostic subtext of Donkey Kong, the best definition I have ever seen of what it means to be a geek (“A geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status”; which is true – I should know – although the most painful part of it is that this configuration does not exclude, but is indeed usually coterminous with, narcissistic self-absorption, such as the narrator exhibits throughout); and a great satiric account of the dot-com boom and bust. This is a novel that remains light on its feet, even as it goes ever further out on a limb that it keeps on sawing off behind itself (a strained metaphor, I admit, but a good account of the book’s actual accomplishment; and if it sounds too much like a back-of-the-book blurb, so be it; the inextricability of commerce and commercial promotion from our innermost fantasies is something that this book doesn’t insist on, so much as it simply takes it for granted as an aspect of The Way We Live Now).

I learned about Derek Raymond from Warren Ellis’ recommendation; The Devil’s Home on Leave is about as grim and downbeat a crime novel I have ever read. The detective narrator recounts a talk with the psychopathic murderer whom he wants to arrest: “He droned on, completely – and what was worse, unconsciously – absorbed in himself, and suddenly I realized what hell it meant, not only to be a killer, but a bore. You think nothing of taking life, but your own existence fascinates you, and that’s the imbalance that we mean by evil… This neat, dull man, crouched in a sort of mass over his own hands, that freaked me.” This book is all about the drab everydayness of horror, grotesque tortures perpetrated by unimaginative bores in a drab industrial setting where it’s always raining. Everyone is wounded, and everyone has their reasons (though these are usually foul ones). The narrator’s stoicism, and his determination to catch the killers even though he knows it won’t do any good, are the only things that keep him from killing himself – it’s that bleak.

Kelly Link‘s short stories, many of them collected in the volume Stranger Things Happen, are marvelous in ways that almost entirely defy description (well, at least they defy my powers of description). I could call these stories surreal, I could call them quirky; both adjectives are accurate, but they are both too bland, and have been overused too much, to give an accurate impression of the singularity of Link’s prose, and the acuteness of her vision. All her stories spell out compelling dreamlike scenarios, with absurdist frameworks, much humor in the details, and undercurrents of dread which nonetheless never gain the upper hand. They are disturbing and perverse in the ways that human desires are nearly always disturbing and perverse, if we look at them honestly and clearly enough; except that such phrases tend to suggest a kind of existential anguish and heaviness that is entirely absent from these stories; they have, instead, a childlike openness (they are in a certain way reminiscent of children’s literature, sort of like a Girl’s Own Adventure), which is also an almost inhuman, or superhuman, lightness, frivolity, and grace (I mean this as the highest possible compliment). Gender certainly has something to do with all this; I cannot imagine these stories, or anything like them, being written by a man, although there is nothing about them that is stereotypically “feminine.” But that is also an inadequate, although accurate, comment. The only comparison I can think of to Kelly Link is Jane Bowles. Actually, Link is not anything like Bowles at all, except for one thing: they both have a sense of humor that is somehow transcendental, that is to say, at the limits of possible understanding, not arising out of the situations being described, but somehow presupposed by those situations instead. I am not sure that I am making sense at all, but it is rare that a fiction writer, especially one I find so wonderful, leaves me so much at a loss for words.

John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.

Andy Clark‘s Natural-Born Cyborgs is an excellent discussion of what new information technologies mean for us as embodied, intelligent beings. Clark argues, rightly, that fears about “unnatural” cyborgization are unfounded. Human beings have always – as long as we have been human – used prosthetic devices to extend our intelligence. Language is the first and most important such prosthetic device; writing is a second, momentously important one. The list goes on, to include all the “media” (in Marshall McLuhan’s sense) that are woven into the texture of our lives. The point is that such technologies are not mere “tools” in contrast to ourselves as conscious minds who merely “use” those tools. Much of our conscious experience, from the way we “use” our hands and feet to the way we remember things that are not directly present to consciousness until we willfully recall them, is in fact based on “distributed systems” without clear boundaries. Through writing, for instance, we can do mathematical calculations, and create narratives and reasoned arguments, that would be impossible to articulate without pen and paper. The best way to explain this is to say that my intelligence is a distributed system that includes the marks on the sheet of paper (and the hands that make those marks, and the eyes that read them back) as well as the flashings across synapses. The result is that we can master a greater body of material than is literally storable in short-term memory. But this can be extended; looking at my wristwatch in order to know the time is no different, and neither is using software to access knowledge that isn’t always implanted in my physical brain, or using a telephone to talk to somebody thousands of miles away. There is simply no sensible way to draw the line between what we do “naturally” and what we only can do with technological prostheses. If anything, what defines human beings as a species is our “natural” ability to extend our bodies and intelligences – by using “technology”, and by exploiting the extreme “neural plasticity” of our minds to adapt culturally, rather than waiting for genetics, to new circumstances and new ways of being – in ways that other animals cannot. I think that Clark is entirely right in his arguments; it’s ridiculous to say that computers and mobile phones and future developments in virtual reality are “denaturing” and “alienating” us any more than using fire, or speech, or drawing marks in the sand has done. So Natural-Born Cyborgs is a smart and useful book; it is also admirably written by an academic philosopher in a readily accessible style (as is all too rarely the case). At times, the book seems a little thin, because the argument has been drawn out for more pages than is really necessary; but this is only a minor quibble, in light of the book’s many virtues. (Also, it’s nice to see a cognitive philosopher who’s savvy enough to cite William Burroughs and J G Ballard and Warren Ellis).