Extracurricular #3: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

Hello reading public! Some time early next week I will be sharing my review of Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer”. Now though, I’d like to share some thoughts on an ‘extra-curricular’ book I’ve just finished reading.

The book is 2000’s Vera {Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov} by Stacy Schiff, who made bookchat headlines more recently with her phenomenal 2010 biography of Cleopatra. As the title kindly informs those of you not already given to prying into the personal lives of great writers, Schiff’s subject is the elusive Vera Nabokov (née Slonim), wife of the great Vladimir.

Extracurricular #2

Hello, reading world! M. and I are working on (read: arguing about) our interpretations of “Midnight’s Children”, and in the meantime I am going to leave you lovely people with a review of one all my all-time favorite nonfiction books.

What is the opposite of a guilty pleasure? Not an innocent pleasure, surely. An innocent pleasure is something that would bring you happiness, amusement, contentment, without causing any damage. Something harmless. That is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is what I would like to think of as constructive hero-worship.
I don’t mean to sound self-righteous. I do have guilty pleasures, in number. Criminal Minds, for instance. Oxford shirts. Those frozen pirogues that come in a box that you can boil in the microwave. I could go on an on, but what I’m writing about today is something totally different. Today I am coming clean to you about my hero-worship, my admiration of and devotion to the unparallel intellect of the late David Foster Wallace.
The book of his that I have been reading most recently (which is to say, the book of his that has been floating around somewhere in my bed for those night when sleep can not and will not come) is Consider the Lobster. This book, like the earlier and brutally genius A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is a collection of essays, from literary reviews to travel pieces to bizarre little snippets of days in Mr. Wallace’s remarkable life.
Of the essays in this book, (of which there are ten), I am going to focus mainly on my (selfishly-chosen) favorites: “Bid Red Son”, “Authority and American Usage”, and the titular essay.
“Big Red Son” is notable for several reasons: 1. DFW wrote it acknowledging his opinions and experiences as ‘yr. correspondents’, and rendered the piece has though it were the deliberations and opinions of two people- the effect of this is fascinating. 2. It is written in such an anthological way- a way that includes the thoughts of author as a sort of set of field notes, reactions to the factual practices of a culture that is totally foreign to him- leaves the reader processing things very slowly (in a way I would imagine the first explorer in Australia would have reacted to an ostrich. It’s clearly there; I just have no idea what to make of it). I walked away from that reading with a tremendous amount of knowledge about the porn industry, its dress, its jargon, its practices, its members- much more than I ever wanted to know. It was not until after I had closed the book, though, that the idea of making a moral judgment about it even crossed my mind.
“Authority and American Usage” is a lengthy essay that, on its surface, is a review of another book I own and love, Mr. Bryan A. Gardner’s Modern American Usage. Although he talks a great deal about the merits of that book, the essay is more than just a review. It is, at sixty-one pages (including end-notes) in my edition, a fairly in-depth look at the stuffy, neurotic, bookish subculture to which both I and my associate here belong. DFW refers to them as S.N.O.O.T., an acronym coined by his own family who themselves are unsure of what it is supposed to stand for. In short, a S.N.O.O.T. is “somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.” Mr. Wallace writes that "In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable with, SNOOT's attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults....-a fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's public English feels like someone using a Stradivarius to pound in nails. We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else." This is a perfect example of what I once heard called DFW’s “aw-shucks genius”- the ability to combine his staggering intellect with his humble, earnest sensibility.
In regards to “Consider the Lobster”, Mr. Wallace is not making an obtuse, pithy joke. He is being totally straightforward in his titular essay- asking his reader to really think about what it means to cook and eat a lobster, what is lobster is, and the culture surrounding lobster consumption. Do to this, he takes his reader to the “enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed” Maine Lobster Festival, not so far afield from when your humble reviewer makes her home base. The most faintly perceptible traces of the same consuming despair at being part of a large crowd doing something mindless and gluttonous that drove “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is present here, in a dazzlingly well-researched way. He is not preachy here, nor does he shy away from the most gruesome part of what is the frankly a rather gruesome endeavor of cooking and eating lobsters on a massive scale. Details of the lobster fishing, selling, and preparation processes are not spared, but there is no sense of indignance or feeling of moral superiority by the author. There are only the observations of Mr. Wallace, in his aw-shucks voice and his unfailing eye.

I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you. A happy happy Thanksgiving to all of you here, and hello! to our readers abroad. We’ll talk to you soon.

-K.

Extracurricular #1

You may know Bill Bryson,for his travelogues A Walk In the Woods, Notes from a Small Island, In A Sunburned Country, etc. or for his explanatory nonfiction books, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Mother Tongue, (my personal favorite) Made in America, and others. To my mind, he can do little wrong. His writing is intelligent, engaging, entertaining, and informative- a rare and valuable combination in today’s writing. I picked up a large-print ex-library copy of his Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid on mega-sale at betterworldbooks.com [1] thinking it was a memoir- probably because it’s subtitled “A Memoir”.

This is supposed to be the chronicle of Bill Bryson’s childhood in Midwestern, mid-century America with the emphasis on his alter-ego, super hero the Thunderbolt Kid. It served well enough as a memoir, but even more than that I found it to be more of a book on the state of America and American domestic life in the 1950’s in which he just happened to star. The book is more about the mind of Americans at the time- people’s reactions to Joseph McCarthy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how daily life was lived in a time before cell phones, the internet, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart, that just happens to be told by a six year old boy who fancies himself a comic book style super-hero who can look at people and make them disappear.

I read it in a three sittings- it definitely goes fast. It definitely had its flaws. I think the biggest point against it in my book was that Mr. Bryson gets just a little bit out of control with his hyperbole. Hyperbole has its affect when used sparingly, but here it got to the point where he would try to present actual facts and it would totally lost on the reader who had heard a dozen other things been called the tallest, smallest, biggest, or best before then. Whenever confusion arises in this book, it is because Bryson has not made it clear enough if he is describing the world with the awe of a child to whom everything is terribly impressive, or if he is a well-researched fact that is actually impressive.

That being said, this book was not short on entertainment value. There were times when my snorts of poorly-repressed laughter did disturb my sleeping roommate. When recounting his first months in elementary school:

“They insisted on knowing strange things, which I found bewildering. If you asked to go to the restroom, they wanted to know whether you intended to do a Number 1 or a Number 2, a curiosity that didn’t strike me as entirely healthy. Besides, these were not terms used in our house. In our house, you either went toity or had a BM…but mostly you just “went to the bathroom” and made no public declarations with regard to intent. So I hadn’t the faintest idea, the first time I requested permission to go, what the teacher ment meant when she asked me if I was going to do number one or number two.

“Well, I don’t know,” I replied frankly and in a clear voice. “I need to do a big BM. It might be as much as a three or a four.”

See? Brilliant! A prime example of the perfectly clear, totally astounding thing known as Child Logic. The hilarity doesn’t stop with the antics of young Bryson. Much is made of the bleached-flour all-American down-home culture of the Midwest in the 1950’s. Community events seemed more prevalent and more important to social life than they are now, but if the food really was as he described, you had better believe I would be a hermit.

“The main course at these potluck events nearly always consisted of a range of meat loafs, each about the size of a V-8 engine, all of them glazed and studded with a breathtaking array of improbable ingredients from which they took their names- Peanut Brittle ‘n’ Cheez-Whiz Upside-Down Loaf and that sort of thing.”

The people that actually partook in these colorful dishes were possibly the only things that could outdo them in hilarious bizarreness: “Hey Dwayne,[2] come over here and try some of this…You want chocolate gravy with that or biscuit gravy or peanut butter ‘n’ niblets gravy?”

There is no shortage of moments like that in this book. If you like Bill Bryson, give it a try. If you were a kid in the 1950’s, give it a try. If your parents were kids in the 1950’s, give it a try. If you appreciate American history, bathroom humor, or sighing nostalgia, (or some combination of the three), pick it up. Read this book, is what I’m saying.

-K.

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[1] If you guys don’t shop there yet, I really can’t recommend it enough. They have killer sales periodically (I think my copy of this book was like $1.60) and for every book you buy, you also pay a few cents to contribute to re-forestation. They have contributed over ten million dollars to literacy projects and reuse or recycle all of their books. Awesome prices AND social responsibility- what more could you ask for?

[2] Apparently approximately 90% of adult males in 1951 were named Dwayne. About the same percentage of females were called Mabel.