xchmp

My first encounter with Michael Chabon’s work was the film adaptation of his second novel, Wonder Boys, which I saw on video while I was working in a video rental store. I watched a lot of movies in the six months I was there (free rentals were one of the perks) otherwise I might have missed it entirely, as so many other people did. It was one of my favourite movies for quite a while after that. I get into quite a few authors through film, but for some reason the fact that Wonder Boys was an adaptation completely passed me by. In fact, I still haven’t read it (though it’s on my list). So the first Chabon novel I’ve read is his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

It’s a coming-of-age story. The feckless Art Bechstein, recently graduated student of the University of Pittsburgh spends the summer falling in love with a Machiavellian young man and a strange-but-interesting girl. Chabon’s style is elaborate enough to entertain. Unfortunately the plot is slight enough that it nearly collapses from the weight of all those baroque descriptions.

I really like the way Chabon writes, but in this debut novel, what he writes about just isn’t satisfying. There are several threads to the novel that slowly draw together, but they lumber along and the final collision is predictable and unspectacular. As the novel progressed beyond its lively opening chapters, I found it increasingly difficult to care about the events. Maybe the bisexual plot-line was more interesting in 1988, but twenty-years on there’s bisexual characters even in TV shows like Doctor Who.

But it’s Chabon’s first novel, and despite the nitpicking above, I did enjoy it. So I’m definitely going to pick up Wonder Boys at some point; after all I already know that enjoyed that plot.

The greatest tragedy about Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science is that the people who need to read it the most won’t. It’s a sustained argument against nonsense masquerading as science, but as Goldacre himself says: “You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.” And this is an eminently reasonable book.

I like science. I’m not a scientist, but I like to think that I understand it pretty well for a non-scientist. Most of what gets taken for science is actually engineering. The Large Hadron Collider? Engineering. The space programme? Engineering. It’s the process of ideas being tested that give us the ability to build things like the LHC and space rockets and mobile phones and medicines. Science is essentially the set of methods we’ve developed over the last thousand or so years to test ideas rigourously. Humans are easily fooled and science is the best way we know how to not decieve ourselves.

Goldacre uses subjects like homoeopathy and nutritionists to demonstrate the many ways in which people fool themselves and fool others. He effectively takes apart the claims of homoeopaths and nutritionists like Gillian McKeith as a demonstration of how such claims can be taken apart. In other words, it’s a training manual to spot this kind of nonsense-presented-as-fact and argue against it effectively. It’s the exact reverse of these self-appointed authorities’ intent – Goldacre is trying to empower the reader, not deceive them. Because Goldacre’s background is in medicine, his examples are exclusively health related, but health is the field of science that most directly impacts people’s lives.

This is really only one of two threads that the book is weaved from; the other is a critique of the media’s tacit role in the acceptance and promotion of nonsense, the misrepresentation and dumbing down of science in public life. See, for example, Language Log‘s many posts about the poor science reporting of the BBC, and Goldacre’s own blog for many, many examples. This culminates in an analysis of the 9 year MMR vaccine debacle, where British media – and especially British newspapers – waged a campaign against the MMR vaccine as a cause of autism for the best part of nine years, on the basis of very little and very poor evidence.

Goldacre doesn’t take an entirely uncritical view of science. He draws attention to the ways that scientists have screwed up, making the wrong decisions. He also examines the way that science is sometimes distorted by powerful financial interests. The point is that these are things that scientists have fixed or want to fix, whereas the promoters of nonsense have no such desire.

Much of the material has its roots in Goldacre’s Guardian column of the same name, but it’s more of a distillation of it than a compilation. In many ways it’s a manifesto. Bad Science is one of the best science books I’ve ever read. It’s stunningly relevant, clearly written and often funny – although as a humanities graduate, I’m not entirely sure that Goldacre’s ire against humanities graduates is entirely warranted. Nevertheless, it explains what science is and why it does it far more clearly than any science lesson or textbook. It’s important stuff. If you know why homoeopathy and vitamin pills and detox are bad things then you should read this book to better understand the extent of the problem. And if you take homoeopathic remedies and your multivitamins and follow a detox plan twice a year, you should read it to understand why you’re wrong.

It took me a while to work out that Raoul Duke the antihero and authorial alias of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wasn’t really intended as a role model. Some kids want to be footballers, some want to be commandos. When I was a teenager, the drug-fueled excesses of Fear and Loathing were the only model of machismo that I could really believe in. But unless you’re as undeniably talented and charismatic as Thompson was – and I never was – behaving like a drunk, drugged madman is neither entertaining nor endearing. It takes all of Thompson’s skills as a writer to transform his train-wreck Las Vegas tales into the riveting and engaging story it is. It has a wild, unhinged machismo that tendsto strike a chord in the male psyche.

As I’ve got older, reading Fear and Loathing has become less comfortable. It’s very definitely a product of early 70s America, and Nixon, though only mentioned a couple of times, hangs over the book like a bad hangover. Thompson makes a persausive case that the only way to cope with the failure the liberalism of the 1960s was to engage in such excess that it wouldn’t hurt any more. At its heart there’s a deep despair, one that’s still be relevant today.

It’s not quite as fun to read now, though the dazzling acrobatics of its prose is still enjoyable if you can ignore the legions of journalists who have tried (and failed) to imitate it.

Panic. It crept up my spine like the first rising vibes of an acid frenzy. All these horrible realities began to dawn on me: Here I was all alone in Las Vegas with this goddamn incredibly expensive car, completely twisted on drugs, no attorney, no cash, no story for the magazine – and on top of everything else I had a gigantic goddamn hotel bill to deal with. We had ordered everything into that room that human hands could carry – including about six hundred bars of translucent Neutrogena soap.

I’m re-reading a lot of novels from my teenage years at the moment. The latest is Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. My original reaction was kind of mixed – I liked the post-modern structure of the novel and the use of the chorus-phrase “So it goes”. But the content seemed rather one-note, only shallowly exploring its themes. Re-reading it, I found that that the bits I enjoyed before are less engaging and the bits I didn’t enjoy still do nothing for me.

On the plus side, Vonnegut has nice turn of phrase every now and then. For example: “This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano” and “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

I guess this pretty much sums up why it didn’t work for me:

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

This may be true, but it’s just not very interesting. And it’s not a profound enough insight to justify the poor characterisation and lack of dramatic confrontation.

Anyway, since I was bored while reading it, I made this graphic, which charts the occurences of the phrase “So it goes” against the pages in my copy of the book:

The first Haruki Murakami novel I ever read was Norwegian Wood. I was 19 and had just arrived at university. I found it in the university book-shop and bought it because I liked the cover. I’d never heard of the novel or the author before. Maybe it was on the reading list of one of the literature courses. I was doing a politics degree and the only literature course I ever took was on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so I don’t know. Either way, it transformed me into a Murakami fan, and over the rest of my university days I worked my way through all the English-translated Murakami works.

So this is only kind of a review. It’s not like I’m going to be remotely objective here. I love this novel.

Some novels should be read at a certain age. The Hobbit should be read when you’re ten years old. There’s no better age than 15 for The Catcher in the Rye. And Norwegian Wood should be read when the ink-and-bleach smell of your textbooks hasn’t quite worn off. For me, it was one of those rare instances of accidentally perfect timing. I was a year older than Toru Watanabe, and was in the Midlands rather than Tokyo. But like him, I was in my first year of a second-rate university. And like him, I was a self-absorbed outsider. To say that I identified with him is something of an understatement. How could I not love a hero who thinks like this?

By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a university education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to abandon my studies straight away, and so I went to my lectures each day, took notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.

Norwegian Wood is a love story. Watanabe is caught between two women: Naoko, who is beautiful, fragile, and emotionally damaged; and Midori, who overflows with self-confidence and independence. At the same time it’s a story about death. There are a startling number of suicides among the novel’s youthful cast. Murakami is far more preoccupied with death than with love. “Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.”

The novel feels like an autobiography, though Jay Rubin’s translator’s note at the end quotes Murakami:

I set Norwegian Wood in the late 1960s. I borrowed the details of the protagonist’s university environment and daily life from those of my own student days. As a result, many people think it is an autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not autobiographical at all. My own youth was far less dramatic, far more boring than his. If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than 15 pages long.

It’s not quite an autobiography, but the scenes set at the university feel like they’re based on affectionate memory. This framework lends an authenticity to the other events. In effect, Murakami sells the less believable aspects of Watanabe’s life to us by wrapping them up in the absolutely realistic setting, drawn from his own life. These scenes are enjoyable all by themselves, particularly when you’re living through the modern British equivalent. It was easy to recognise the counterparts to his characters in the people around me.

And though Norwegian Wood is ostensibly about love and death, it’s really about finding a way to co-exist with society. Each of Murakami’s characters represents a different kind of person who fits in or fails to fit in to society in their own way. Naoko tries to separate herself from society by retreating to a community of outsiders. Nagasawa, an older student, shares Watanabe’s disdain for society, but fits in by exploiting it in every way he can. And the characters who commit suicide, reject society for their own reasons. None of the characters we get to know find themselves able to believe in the revolutionary actions going on in the turbulent times they’re living through. Watanabe may have to decide which woman he wants to be with, but the real decision is how to reconcile being an outsider with having to live in society.

“You’re very clear about what you like and what you don’t like,” she said.

“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe that’s why people don’t like me. Never have.”

“It’s because you show it,” she said. “You make it obvious you don’t care whether people like you or not. That makes some people angry.”

Norweigian Wood is an extraordinary novel, although it’s not really representative of Murakami’s work, which is generally much more direct in its symbolism. But this is part of its charm – it’s a multi-layered and often subtle novel and rewards re-reading. My perspective on it now, at 26 is very different to they way I felt about it at 19, and it’ll probably be different again in another seven years. It’s one of my favourite books, and if it’s tinged with angst and melancholy, it’s also filled with the author’s genuine affection for the characters and a multitude of funny, touching moments. Like I said, I love this novel. If you haven’t read Murakami, you could do a lot worse than starting here.

What the world needs is another blog post about Fight Club. The book by Chuck Palahniuk, not the film by David Fincher, that is. I read the book after I saw the film, so I was 18. Like Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it defined my teenage years. I was kind of rebellious and these transgressive books of drugs, death and self-destruction keyed into that perfectly. I was an angry young man and the idea of fighting everything that was wrong with society, the dark, glistening glamour of it was exactly what I wanted to hear. These days, I don’t read it like that. Whether that’s because I’m not so angry, or because I’m not so young is up for grabs.

There’s not a whole lot of point to reviewing books like Fight Club. Everyone’s seen the film or read the book and if you haven’t and want to find out if you should, then there’s over 600 reviews on Amazon. So this isn’t a review. If I were writing a review, though, I’d point to Palahniuk’s minimalistic style and the way it condenses a novel into a series of quotable sections. I can flip to a random page and come up with some phrase or paragraph that could be slapped onto a fridge magnet and sold at a profit. Or stuck in a film and endlessly repeated by students on media courses:

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.”

Another reason that Fight Club hit such a deep nerve with me when I was 18 is that it’s all about growing up, rebelling and rejecting authority. The novel constantly equates fathers, God and authority figures, initially covertly, but eventually explicitly: “If you’re male and Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God.” And the lack of these things, God, fathers and authority figures is the cause of the malaise that leads to the formation of the fight clubs. The men there are “a generation of men raised by women.” The fight clubs, with their vaguely homoerotic grunting and noise and hyper-masculinity are, like the testicular cancer support group the narrator attended, about remaining men together; fighting against a world where men like the narrator have substituted IKEA furniture catalogues for pornography.

The narrator’s problem is that he can’t grow up. Because he has no father, no God and no effective authority figures, he has nothing solid to rebel against to establish his adulthood. Ever since college he makes friends, his friends get married, he loses friends. They grow up and he isn’t able to follow them into adulthood. The closest thing he has to a father is his boss – “sometimes you find your father in your career.” The death of the narrator’s boss is the end of the second act of the novel and the start of the third. The murder of his substitute-father allows him to finally start to progress beyond the angstful rebellion of Tyler.

Tyler is a seductive figure and the narrator’s relationship to him is similar to the way I reacted to the character when I first read the book. Tyler exemplifies outsider masculinity, free from the encumbrances of society. He inspires the men who join the fight clubs and Project Mayhem by sheer coolness.

I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.

But at closer examination, Tyler’s philosophising is empty. Like the advertising that he criticises – “as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says” – he’s selling an image to the guys who follow him. His cobbled-together philosophy, a taped-together conglomeration of nihilism, anarchism, Marxism environmentalism and Zen is self-contradicting dogma. He has guys saying things like. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost heap.” At the same time, Tyler thinks the goal of Project Mayhem is to “teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. But look at Project Mayhem’s links with Taylorism. Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” are the key principles behind modern work and led to the assembly-line work of Fordism. It may be significant the the nameless narrator works for an equally nameless automotive company. Compare this extract from Taylor’s 1911 monograph, The Principles of Modern Management to the way that Tyler organises Project Mayhem:

Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work.

Project Mayhem isn’t about achieving anything. It’s about being bad. It’s about acting out: “Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption [...] Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.” These are Tyler’s words, and hence they are also the narrator’s. That’s the reason that Tyler exists: To be noticed. The book charts the escalation of the badness, from the initial violence of the fight club, to the “complete and right-away destruction of civilisation” that forms the goal of Project Mayhem.

Eventually, after rejecting Tyler, the narrator finds himself in heaven (AKA a psychiatric hospital) where he meets God (AKA a psychiatrist). The narrator has finally found a way out of his predicament. He’s found his father-figure and is able to respond to him as an adult rather than a child. Rather than the adolescent rebellion that Tyler represented, he is able to disagree. He doesn’t need to be bad to get attention any more – he has God’s attention.

I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.

We are not special.

We are not crap or trash, either.

We just are.

We just are, and what happens just happens.

And that’s how I’ve changed since I was an angry young man of 18 approaching the book for the first time. You realise that Tyler’s an asshole and you grow up.