Greatest Sentence Ever

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium’s picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV’s channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider’s 220 regular and premium channels and that he was going to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley’s home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan bedroom to lay out the next day’s crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep again once more.

-David Foster Wallace “Mister Squishy”

Whoa.

Joyce Carol Oates is not a hack.

I have to admit that for quite a while, I was under the impression that Joyce Carol Oates is a hack. I came to this conclusion without having actually read any of her work, but from observing her sheer rate of Stephen King-esque output - a new novel each and every year, on top of numerous essays, short fiction, and the occasional play. Surely a writer that prodigious, my thinking went, must be hack. It defies reason for someone to write that quickly, and write well. That Oates regularly rakes in the literary prizes and has her work reprinted in a variety of end-of-year collections, in both "literary" and "genre" anthologies, was insufficient to persuade me - indeed, I am ashamed to say that when I saw her name prominently headlining fantasy and horror anthologies, I was further convinced that Oates must be a hack. Pshaw, genre work! Hack, hack, hack!

This summer, I actually found time between sneering at the voluminous "Oates section" at bookstores - as I liked to think of them - to actually pick up one of her books. I read "The Falls," Oates' 2004 novel (no, I am not exaggerating about the one novel a year thing. Check her wikipedia page if you don't believe me.) "The Falls" won the French Prix Femina prize in the "foreign category," but in that it's hardly unique among Oates' work, as it seems each of her novels garners some kind of recognition or another. And I expected to hate it, but I realized that it was an incredible book. In fact, it's kind of genius. "The Falls" has a ambitiously sprawling plot, vivid depictions of decidedly unpredictable characters, a meticulously captured historical setting, and academically hip intertextuality - including an inspired nod to James Joyce's "Yes she said yes" passage from Ulysses that may even surpass the original. It manages to be formally innovative while doing all this, employing both a conventional third-person narrator and a sort of tributaries-of-consciousness style that briefly follows individual characters.

So, Joyce Carol Oates is not a hack. She's just some kind of literary savant capable of superhuman achievement in writing. That, or she knows how to compress time.

Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

As a way to get myself in the habit of writing regularly, I'm going to try to post regularly to this blog over the next month or so. I've done a lot of media consumption (and subsequent reflection) this summer, so there's plenty of material percolating: stray thoughts on a book I just read, responses to what I see on TV, pretentious ideas occupying my higher brain functions as I distract myself with a video game. Having a rather high opinion of myself, my natural impulse is to turn to someone and share these stunning insights aloud, but all too often there is no audience readily available to witness my piercing observations. So I'll write them down instead.

I'll start with a book I read this past week, Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper. Picoult has found one of those subjects both very relevant to real life yet fertile with dramatic potential that all writers and wannabe writers (like myself) wish they had thought of themselves. Anna Fitzgerald is conceived for the express purpose of serving as a marrow donor for her leukemic older sister, Kate. Prior to implantation, her embryo is genetically screened from a batch to be a perfect bone marrow match. Moments after her birth Anna's precious umbilical stem cells are whisked away to reinforce Kate's beleaguered immune system, and as she grows up Anna undergoes numerous operations, shots, and transfusions to prevent the lethal relapse of Kate's leukemia. Her parents love her and don't like to call her a "designer baby" but that is, effectively, what she is: Anna was selected and born for a purpose.

This scenario has in fact been seen in a number of families with a leukemic young child, which is part of what makes My Sister's Keeper such a potent novel. Picoult gives the narrative a jolt by opening with Anna, age 13 and unwilling to serve as a kidney donor for Kate, filing legal papers for medical emancipation from her parents. The subsequent legal controversy and family dysfunction propel the rest of the plot.

My Sister's Keeper was a enjoyable and brisk read - I might even go so far as to call it a "page-turner" if that phrase didn't have vaguely pejorative connotations - but still, I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with it. Ultimately I believe my disenchantment can be traced to the central emancipation plot. Picoult takes a scenario of enormous emotional complexity and dimension only to reduce it in order to make it fit a rather facile legal controversy. The life of a "typical" family with a designer donor baby is quite fascinating enough; there's no need for the author to contrive a rather outlandish legal gesture to inject some drama into the family dynamic. A more understated exploration of the unarticulated pity, obligation, and even occasional resentment of a typical donor/recipient relationship would probably have been far more provocative than what Picoult gives us here. Indeed, the overt recrimination and conflict the Fitzgerald family experiences as a consequence of Anna's dramatic decision is, if anything, quite familiar to us from other stories or own lives.

This impulse to "add the drama" is sadly evident throughout the book. Like many Picoult novels, My Sister's Keeper is resolved with a court case in the fourth act, but along the way it acquires one overwrought, contrived subplot after another. The older brother acts out by committing acts of arson which are then investigated by the fireman father. Anna's lawyer has a service dog for some unnamed disability that he's too proud to voice aloud. The court-appointed guardian ad litem still bears emotional wounds from a tumultuous high school romance with Anna's lawyer. Anna's mother is also an attorney and represents herself in court, cross-examining the father when Anna's lawyer calls him as a witness. (This produces perhaps the most cringe-inducing moment in the novel when the mother plaintively asks the estranged father, "When are you coming home?") These subplots leaden and encrust what is actually a very well-conceived relationship between Anna and Kate, who engage in movingly familiar rituals of sibling affection and bickering even as they together confront their extraordinary and unfamiliar challenges.

Unfortunately the relationship between Anna and Kate receives perhaps the least attention in the book as Picoult abandons it in order to pursue her many dramatic contrivances, and also to withhold information from the reader for a big reveal in the fourth act that is nevertheless rather predictable. There's also a second heavy-handed twist in the final pages that resolves everything a bit too neatly. My Sister's Keeper is being adapted into film - Nick Cassavetes, of The Notebook, is attached to direct - which does not surprise me; with its many twists, reversals, and romantic entanglements it is an exceedingly theatrical book - which is to say, unlike our less dramatic actual lives.

None of this is necessarily to imply that My Sister's Keeper is a bad book; it's far too well-written for that. The book brought me close to tears more than once - though on those occasions I couldn't shake the impression that I was being manipulated, as when a film produces a baby in peril or turns up the melancholy violin soundtrack. I might wish that Picoult treated her subject with a lighter touch and restrained herself to a purer, smaller story, but I must concede that she demonstrates tremendous craft with the story that she does choose to tell. I should also concede that I have the sort of jaded pomo taste that sees authorial contrivance everywhere and is predisposed to dislike Picoult's grander treatment of this subject in favor of a sparser, more minimalist approach.

In the end I guess my feelings about the book come down to this: my copy of the book came in a very effete teal-and-peach pastel, with a cover photo of two tank top-wearing girls leaning against each other that resembles something from one of those faddish tween chick-lit "Gossip Girl" books. I like to pride myself the kind of progressive, educated person who is above arbitrary social constructions of gender and superficial masculine vanity, but I have to confess that when I was reading at the coffee shop I surreptitiously kept the book flat against the table surface, or read from underneath the table like a guilty elementary student. If, like me, you can't quite get past the cover, then the florid melodrama that obscures the fascinating central dilemma in My Sister's Keeper will probably prove an equally discouraging obstacle. Whether that's a failing of the book or of myself, I don't think I'm in a position to say.