Joseph Grammer's Blog

Snippet

"Aicardi-Goutieres syndrome-6: my lucky fate. I would have died were it not for my guardian, a man known as Fasili. A great man and steward. A terrorist according to some people, a genius to others, although to me he was only ever wendim, brother. Brother.

A brother is someone who loves you no matter what, even when they're boxing your ears—isn't that so, everyone?

A brother cares for you without pretense, and even if he pretends to groan as he cooks you your eggs, you know that it's nothing but an act, a brief play to entertain you as you wait for his breakfast. “Oh, Candace,” he might say, one hand flung across his forehead in mock-exhaustion, tending the frying pan with the other, “I fear I'm going to faint with all this toil you're forcing me to complete.”

And I would laugh in terror, knowing he was joking but some small shard of me horrified that he might really collapse and viciously, swiftly leave me alone, undefended, immobile.

Even then, death was present. Isn't that the joke, too? Even in our grandest moments, even when we are laughing with loved ones all around, and the wine is being passed, and all your family's eyes are lit up with nothing but excitement and joy, even then death is there."

Your Problematic Fave

So holy shit. When I write drafts of fiction, I realize how often I'm misogynistic and racist.

Big surprise. Why? Because I have internalized biases, no matter how I try to be "progressive" and "enlightened." I have 20-something years of cultural feedback telling me about how men are strong, women are weak, and POC are exotic or dangerous. And, of course, how cishet white guys are the default "normal."

I know the mere mention of these words may enrage you, but too bad. It's not oppressing your freedom of speech to identify your biases and say how they suck. I try to do this with myself, and with my writing, and I'm happy to say my story is getting less shitty over time, less reliant on harmful cliches and stereotypes. (It's almost like I'm learning to write actual fleshed-out, 3D characters!)

Will I always have to work to be mindful of these biases? Yeah.

Do I have an obligation as a writer to do that? Also yeah.

If you are a writer, and you don't think you need to constantly uproot your casually brutal prejudicial ideas, then obviously no one can force you to do it. But it does signal to everyone else that you don't prioritize thinking about other people. And you can't get mad if people think you're an asshole because of it.

Empty Head

Sometimes, you need to let go and allow things to be exactly as they are. (And by sometimes, I mean all the fucking time, amiright??!?!!!!?%$##*&)

I'm right.

Writing is like dancing in that formal education is probably super-helpful for becoming a pro, but if you really push your peculiarities to the limit, you can still be pretty cool, as long as you're a nice autodidact who learns widely, listens to criticism, and preserves a deep, maddening love for your art without letting it become more important than other people.

If you're reading this now and you're unsure if you should start writing or continue writing, just know that you absolutely fucking goddamn should, because your words are important. And if somebody tells you they're not important, maybe they're right ... but you should still keep writing anyway. You're going to suck for a long time before you become remotely good, but it's really important to belittle yourself as little as possible, and to treat your art with the kind of love religious people probably feel in church.

If you do that, then by garsh (*Goofy chuckle as Evanescence roars in the background*), you just might make a swell helping of fiction.

So go do it.

All the Wrong Things with Alien: Covenant

Yesterday I watched Alien: Convenant with my friends. We went to Chinatown in Washington, D.C., and the theater was pretty empty on a Saturday night. I was relaxed, comfortable, excited for a horror movie. Usually I avoid horror, but Alien was the first horror movie I ever saw, at age like six, and scared the fucking shit out of me. For weeks I thought monsters could burst out of your chest if you ate the wrong food, and I felt horrible when I thought about chewing meat. It was the first time I can remember feeling sickened, revolted, terrified by the possibilities of violence that the world could invent. I was pretty lucky that my first run-in with that feeling was through a movie, and not through war, domestic abuse, or anything like that. But at the time -- fuck.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

So walking into Alien: Covenant, I was weirdly happy. Part of me expected some closure for my childhood space memories, which, although they no longer made me feel terrified or ill, definitely sat in my mind as a sort of fucked-up watershed for storytelling. In some ways, I compare everything I define as horror to Alien. It's like my shiny, black, hissy Ur-fear.

That said, the movie failed on all counts for terror. I've written before about Stephen King's discrimination among horror, terror, and revulsion, and it's safe to say Mr. Scott went primarily with revulsion for this film. Aliens burst out of spines, out of chests; they brutally claw holes in people and begin eating them. I was surprised at how easy it was for me to watch, but in a world where extreme violence is casually shown on cable TV, I suppose it's not an uncommon response.

Maybe one thing that affects this feeling of "meh" with the grossness is that the world knows about the Aliens by now. We know they worm their way into a human host, incubate, and explode in a gory pop of organs and blood. So by the first image of the film, we're perfectly aware some ignorant dude is going to die like this. We know the Aliens are going to stalk and maim people.

Does this mean Mr. Scott is fighting an uphill battle with regards to horror? Possibly, yes; his first movie hangs over this one like a cloud, reminding us of all the spooky shit that first frightened us, catching us unawares. Does that mean it's impossible to generate a true feeling of horror, of not knowing what's coming next? Of course not -- he can do that if he wants, or if he finds writers good enough to do it. But in this movie, there is no slow build-up to real horror, even if it checks all the boxes on the list:

Initial misfortune to set the tone of tragedy

Early mechanical issues that come into play later on

A familiar but kind of unsettling intergalactic message

Unrealistic optimism at a "too-good-to-be-true" scenario

Seemingly nice but baffling things, like wheat on a strange planet.

Dead silence (e.g., no birdcalls)

A creepy tunnel

You get the idea. This is horror-by-the-numbers, a fairly plodding and mechanical approach to storytelling. A great genre film can transcend its rigid structure by making us care about the characters, by giving us a rich atmosphere we can soak up, by offering some truly surprising twists we couldn't have guessed. Alien: Covenant doesn't do any of this: even its images, while definitely getting the feeling of vastness across, seem overly muted and somber, more depressing or even lackluster than scary.

It felt like I was watching this movie through a wall of ice at many points: the distance felt bloodless and clinical, even when we were up close in the action with people wildly firing weapons at a velocripator-like neomorph, which is basically a sickly white xenomorph that is marginally cuter.

Michael Fassbender is the actor everyone's been talking about for this film, with good reason. He plays two different androids, Walter and David, each of whom have different accents. He gets across the clipped steadfastness of Walter pretty well, as well as David's wounded, polished, grandiose insanity.

And Kate Waterston as Daniels was very solid; it was unfortunate she didn't get as much screentime, and she doesn't really start kicking ass until much later in the movie. Fassbender gets a lot of the spotlight here, which is nice -- but I would've liked to see more of Daniels' psychological state, to spend more time with her.

I can't forget this is a horror movie (or horror-action-thriller thing), so everyone is supposed to die. Not everyone does, but it ends on a (kind of weak) bleak note, and considering Eliazbeth Shaw's fate (the protagonist of Prometheus), Daniels' future isn't much brighter. So it's like, fuck, she's just going to be mutated into some horrible alien in the next film.

On a side note, it would've been cool to see any footage of Elizabeth Shaw, because we spent a whole movie getting to know her. And are we expected to go through the same thing for the sequel? Main female character dies, up pops a new one?

Okay, moving on.

It was hard to love the characters. We don't get a sense of their individual motivations and lives: why did they sign up for this colony mission? What are their pasts? We don't need ninety minutes of drama on each person, but even a fucking conversational scene about their lives would've been nice. I know the teaser/pre-release scene they showed gives us a sort of Last Supper element, which I really liked, but I wanted more of that in the movie proper.

The twist is obvious. Walter and David are identical-looking androids. Walter is good, David is evil. If you can't guess that there's going to be a switch-up with these characters, you're probably not thinking at all during this movie -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The action isn't thrilling. I wanted to be horrified and awe-inspired at the same time, like my memories of Alien. Even discounting the nostalgia factor of the first movie, the action here doesn't hold up. Sure, there's wild gun-firing, and alien sneak-attacks, but it feels forced. The terror isn't palpable, even if the alien assaults are more brutal than before. We get more savagery on the surface, but less overall emotion, so we feel far away.

And since the characters aren't well developed (Danny McBride as Tennessee does a decent job of giving his Southern-American character some life at least, although even he is exceptionally understated), the stakes aren't high.

Oh, the random guard smoking a cigarette gets sick? Who cares.

Another guy with a beard dies? So what? We don't know these people at all.

I certainly sound callous, but I really want to be sad when a character dies. Make me yell or cry. Here, the characters were just fodder for the monsters, which was disappointing. I might be asking too much of a horror movie, but this is Ridley Scott we're dealing with. So come on, man.

Still, the fact that I'm writing about this at all means it produced some feelings in me. I've always liked the look of the Aliens, and Scott does a good job showing us how they move, skittering around like fucked-up cat-bugs. The CGI was better than I expected, even if one or two parts seemed slightly fake. The neomorphs in particular looked better than the xenomorphs. (What a goddamn sentence.)

I did like Daniels' and Tennessee's interactions together, even if they got a bit too jokey after both their spouses died. I also thought Daniels and Walter had a nice rapport, and Fassbender did a great job of being emotional and kind while also maintaining the feel of something slightly "other" than human. That was a sweetness I wish I'd gotten more of, because it balances the darkness and so highlights more.

This brings into question the pacing of the movie, which isn't a non-stop gore-fest by any means. It takes probably thirty minutes for bad shit to really go down, and after a brutal few minutes of alien stuff, there's a lull while everyone recuperates at the not-yet-revealed-to-be-psychotic David's house (which, incidentally, is the Engineer spaceship from Prometheus).

I really liked the robotic, narcissistic, possibly incestuous homoerotic tension between David and Walter when David teaches his updated counterpart to play a lute-type instrument. Also, yeah, they kiss each other. Obviously there are time constraints, and it was probably a big deal for Scott to invest as much time into the Walter-David relationship as he did (since that is time not spent murdering), but I would've liked even more of that dynamic. It oddly felt like one of the freshest and most real relationships, even though it's two androids both played by the same actor. And also, you might just like to see Michael Fassbender make out with himself. (Eh, it's just a kiss though.) Have fun with that, Internet fan fiction!

There is a middle twist, too, where we find out David is the one who creates the modern xenomorph by doing creepy mad-scientist experiments with the black goo shit from the Engineer planet. An android creates Aliens! I know that's supposed to be a big deal, but I don't really care. He's a creepy serial-killer android, which is cool, but ... eh. It's not exactly a "OHHHHH!" type revelation.

When it comes to other characters, I did like Demian Bichir's character as well; he's a good actor and put a lot of feeling into his role, even though they gave him like zero cool lines. When he gets his face burned by acid, his screams actually made me feel worried. I can't really say the same for anyone else who got alien-murdered, although Karine and Maggie's harrowing scene together with the first neomorph offered a good chance for some terrified screaming. I think that scene did pull me in, because it wanted me to be like, "OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!" when Karine was trapped inside with the horribly convulsing host-guard, and I felt exactly that. I actually wanted both of those characters to have more screentime as well, but ... death (aka Ridley Scott) is a fucked-up dude who doesn't care what I want.

And speaking of emotion, Kate Waterston does a good job bringing out the tears for a weak backstory, and she gets across her stoic (but not too stoic) sadness very well. And I've already mentioned Fassbender, but there are two scenes in particular where his David really gets to show some nice emotion. One is when he's explaining the (fictional) story of Elizabeth Shaw's death, and we see him show actual sorrow. Whether those are crocodile tears or not, I don't know, but it was cool to see. The second scene was actually really funny to me in a good way, and it's after the true xenomorph is born. Basically David tricks the captain of Daniels' ship, a religious guy named Oram, into stupidly looking down into a facehugger egg, and ... guess what. That wasn't surprising at all, but what was nice was David's smile of almost parental joy when the alien explodes out of its "host." He really gave us a look like, "Aww, I'm so proud."

So what is Alien: Covenant? A few nice emotional moments, some brutal hosting, and a decent alien fight at the end. Also, an extremely obvious twist where David assumes Walter's identity and then leads us closer to the timeline of the original Alien by stowing some alien eggs onboard the colonists' ship.

We end with Daniels and Tennessee frozen in hypersleep, and David listening to Wagner, calmly awaiting the 7 years until he lands on a new planet.

I'll probably watch the sequel on Netflix in like 2020, but I hope they do a better job on the writing/character development front. If they do that, and really try to nail the tension-building and horror (which is like the point of the movie), then I'll be spookily happy.

Sicario

If you'd like to see a study in tension-building, please watch Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve. The first time I watched it, I couldn't remember anybody's name, or how the plot had progressed, even directly after finishing it, but the consistent tone of tightness or tension left its mark on me, so I watched it two more times in the span of a week.

Much has been said about this movie already. I saw pieces about the city of Juarez protesting it, criticisms of its focus on Americans rather than Mexicans, and even an interesting take on the protagonist's journey as a rape in the abstract.

Here is the plot in a nutshell: FBI agent Kate Macer (played by Emily Blunt) joins a secret team aiming to take out a high-level drug kingpin in Mexico. However, she is kept from knowing most of the details until the very end.

With her is smarmy "DOD advisor" Matt (Josh Brolin) and taciturn Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), and to a lesser extent her fellow agent Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya).

*SPOILERS FOLLOW*

The movie is lean and features memorable set pieces, such as a firefight on the Bridge of the Americas, a night-vision raid outside Juarez, and a bloody climax in a Mexican drug mansion. Tension is the theme of the day here, boosted by Johann Johannsson's fucked-up apocalyptic score, which sort of acts like its own character to me.

Dread, horror, suspense, discomfort. These words all apply to many scenes of the movie, but never in excess. This is a film that seems to eschew excess for momentum, although some scenes, such as a mass interrogation of illegal immigrants, and the freezing of a drug dealer's bank accounts, dragged on for me. Still, those are minor points, and the two hours of the film go by pretty damn quickly.

Some highlights: beautiful shots of the American-Mexican scrubland, mutilated corpses hanging from a Juarez bridge, and the aforementioned Bridge of the Americas scene, which features tattooed gangsters and Kevlar'd Special Ops agents.

One of the weaknesses, as has been described before, is the lack of focus on the Mexicans affected by the drug trade, and this is a valid criticism. We have a mini-story of a corrupt Mexican police officer who works with the cartel, but who also has a son and wife he loves and wants to protect. This piece, while it sincerely tries to be honest and heartfelt, mostly fails due to the screentime ratio. It feels like an add-on, but having said this, I am sympathetic to it, because the movie would be even more whitewashed without it.

"Whitewashing" is a serious debate in today's movie world, at least as far as I am aware in my decidedly unglamorous cubby in Northern Virginia. Benicio del Toro appears to be the rebuttal to any claim of racism, seeing as he becomes the main character, in effect, towards the end of the movie, after we learn he is a hitman from a rival cartel hellbent on getting revenge for the murder of his wife and daughter. The CIA just happens to be a useful vehicle for him to get to the man responsible, a cartel heavy named Fausto Alarcon. Still, this is not really a departure from the cliches of Latino movie characters.

We see Mexico as an object of penetration. US Special Forces, with Kate in tow, surgically enter and carry out missions on Mexican soil. Kate eventually discovers she is kept around only to legally rubber-stamp what turns out to be a bloody and probably illegal series of operations.

Is this just another Hollywood reduction of the drug war to "gutted, violent Mexico and heavily-armed white America"? Pretty much yes, but the tone of unsettled nihilism that runs throughout elevates it into something more morally compromised, and thus better.

I can't pretend to know a lot about movies, but I can say I think most of the exposition was left out to focus on action and tone. We know, for example, that Kate is divorced, but we never move deeply or meaningfully into her past. These details don't matter in this world of Villeneuve's: only the mission.

Most of the characters are ciphers: peacekeepers or gunmen who are defined by the weapons they carry, and by their masculine "hardness." Kate, as the lone female of the bunch, stands as her own representation of toughness, but one with a decidedly more virtuous core. Perhaps it is her status as a relative "outsider" to the drug war: she has only lived in America, and even though she sees things like bomb-rigged mutilated corpses, she doesn't see the "truly" terrible things until she crosses the border.

We know Kate certainly has principles. She tries to prosecute cases "by the book," and threatens to talk when she discovers Alejandro is a cartel member (not another "DOD advisor") being sent to assassinate a rival cartel head.

Some reviews have called this part of the plot ridiculous or foolish. It does feel like something over-the-top: would our government, even the myth-laden branch of the CIA, treat a cartel member like a special agent and use him to kill people?

Well, in 1954, the CIA sent in nearly 500 mercenaries, led by a Guatemalan colonel, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala. So there's that. However, I also found a blog by an ex-Special Forces operator, who brings up the idea that Hollywood assumes the government is in evil-conspiracy mode, when it reality it's usually in "chicken-with-its-head-cut-off" mode.

Realism aside, however, the main takeaway I have from this movie is the treatment of tension. It simmers and builds from the first shot, and it pretty much never stops escalating, although you could cite the illegal immigrant scene and the bank scene as low points.

And that's the point of a thriller, right? After all is said and done, it is supposed to build suspense. This Sicario does very well. As for whether it treats Mexico fairly, or whether it accurately depicts Special Ops missions -- that is up for debate.

I should mention how important it is that the protagonist is female, although I am just regurgitating other writers' ideas. But it is true. Kate's gender seems more striking of an issue when she is constantly lied to and patronized by powerful, knowledge-holding males, mainly CIA operative Matt. Alejandro's patronizing of Kate is more of the "benevolent sexism" type: she reminds him of his murdered daughter.

However, even this "positive sexism" falls away to reveal something more sinister when, at the end of the film, Alejandro puts a gun to Kate's chin and forces her to sign a document saying the whole operation was done "by the book."

Violence is the language of these men, on both sides of the war: Alejandro, Matt, Fausto, Manuel Diaz (a sort of lieutenant in the cartel). I know I mentioned there was no excess, but the violence in this movie is definitely extreme. The "good guys" torture people. The "bad guys" torture people, too. And it is all for ... what? A marginally more "controllable" cartel situation. The futility and hopelessness of the drug war is what first prompts Kate to join the task force where she meets Matt and Alejandro. But by the end of the story, we are not given any hope. The drug war does not seem any closer to being won, an idea that has already become something of a cliche in our war-numbed society.

Sicario is a genre film that excels in its confines, while managing to be a bit surprising in its own way. By keeping Alejandro's mission a secret from us, we don't expect him to be as important as he is revealed to be. In fact, the whole third act is mainly Alejandro's show: he kidnaps the corrupt Mexican cop whom we were briefly introduced to, kills him, kidnaps Manuel Diaz, and then uses him to enter Fausto's guarded complex--all by himself. (Although the Special Ops team helped him in the beginning, and communicate with him once he is solo.)

The "reveal," then, is Alejandro's personal vendetta, and we suddenly jump protagonists into his world for the final scenes. Was this unexpected to me? Yes. Did I feel cheated? Not exactly. I think Kate's character upheld her end of the bargain by being morally uncompromising, so it would never have made sense for her to go on a killing spree like Alejandro does.

However, there is a sense that Villeneuve is giving us the "blood" that a good action thriller demands, and his way of doing that is showing us the actions of someone who is basically the loose cannon of the Colombian cartel.

Kate is our way of standing to the side of the violence, of being horrified by it. Alejandro is the fulfillment of the thriller's deal: we see him kill Fausto, his wife, and his two children at their dinner table, seemingly unchanged, seemingly remorseless.

"Violence begets violence" is yet another cliche, and this one rings true for this movie. Alejandro's family was killed, so he kills Fausto's. "Do you think your wife would be proud of what you've become?" Fausto asks him in his last moments, and Alejandro does not answer that question. He is past considerations such as that: he is committed to vengeance.

The idea of vengeance is very old, and it has been proposed as an essential need of humankind. Not that we should always obtain it, but just that we all feel a desire for it. I have read that vengeance is about making the transgressor understand what he or she did wrong--a deeply emotional understanding created through the infliction of pain.

This Alejandro does when he shoots Fausto's wife and kids first. We don't see them fall, we just see Fausto's horrified expression. Alejandro clearly wants this man to understand what it is like to lose a loved one in a violent way. He wants this so badly he is willing to kill children.

If you say that makes Alejandro a psychopath, I can't fully disagree with you. He commits terrible crimes just to have the chance to commit this even more terrible crime, and then he walks away from it all without any dramatic monologue, without evidence of regret. He is a self-proclaimed "wolf," and he tells Kate "this is the land of wolves now." Kate, something other than a wolf, cannot survive in the "real world" where things like laws don't matter. This is classic cynical Hollywood tale-telling, with references to "how things are really done" in the world. I suppose it can't help but owe a debt to the violent, government-suspicious thrillers of the '60s and '70s. (Alan J. Pakula, perhaps.)

But these are just my half-baked neophyte ideas on film history. What I'm more interested in is the tension, the atmosphere, the tone, the music, and the decision to "jump ship" out of Kate's perspective and show us Alejandro's world for the final few minutes of the movie.

In a way, this is a movie about innocence. Everyone is corrupted to some degree, from Matt to Alejandro, and so when we lave Kate, when we leave our moral anchor and just see Alejandro on his "mission," we see the full loss of innocence. This is America killing people in a foreign country using a drug cartel's hitman.

Obviously, a story like that would make a few headlines if that was ever discovered to be true, although a cynical agent in Juarez quips, after the Bridge of the Americas firefight leaves Kate bewildered and angry, "This won't even make the papers in El Paso," highlighting either the ignorance of the American public to Mexican events, or the violence-benumbed indifference they have towards the war on drugs.

And furthermore, Matt cites as the real reason for the cartels the fact that "20% of Americans" won't stop "smoking and shooting this shit," namely: drugs. So many of us are complicit, are compromised. We read about the cartels' violence online and feel disgusted, but we don't see how we participate in the cycle.

It's also interesting that this movie does not show any drug use (unlike Traffic). It is only about the war on drugs. And the war on drugs, Sicario tells us, is truly a war, with spies, automatic weapons, and innocent casualties.

My final points are about tension-building. As far as I can tell, Vileneuve achieves this through good editing and music, as well as powerful images. I think the most striking picture is the mutilated corpses hanging from the bridge in Juarez (itself considered somewhat of a cliche, albeit a horrifying and sad one, by now). As a tangent, this movie seems to embrace its cliches and, to some degree, overcomes them. That image of those bodies is seared in my mind, paired as it is with the deeply disturbing score and Alejandro's terse "Welcome to Juarez." That scene should have felt laughable and extremely cliched--how many times have you heard an actor say "Welcome to X" after some violent or shocking scene plays out?--but it did not. Part of this is the solid acting, since everyone nails their clipped, militant seriousness, but it's also due to self-awareness. Sicario knows the tropes of thrillers and accepts them, while also trying to provide them as best as it can--sort of like Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

And much like The Maltese Falcon (the book version), we are introduced to a cynical, violent, morally gray world where people's inner thoughts are not made privy to us. Much like this book, we are given a genre piece that aims to be something higher, and mostly achieves it. It doesn't throw in an extra romance for the sake of audience pleasing, or delve into the always-traumatized backstories of the main characters. It just shows us the mission. The mission is all, and the mission is ethically wrong, and the mission is futile, at least seen in the grand scope of this conflict.

Sicario is about violent men forcing other men to be violent, and one woman being disgusted by it. This is summed up when Kate draws a gun on Alejandro at the very end, but can't bring herself to shoot him, to transgress the laws she actually somehow believes in. She is not a wolf. And the movie raises the question: how much of our world is governed by wolves? And this seems to beg the next question: what do we non-wolves do in it? And Alejandro's answer is: "Move to a small town where the rule of law still exists."

Now, is this all a bit over-dramatized? The idea of the crumbling, lawless urban empire is another cliche at this point, and the idea of the world being governed by nothing but lawbreaking and brutal violence is another old one. It's certainly popular fodder for fatalists, pessimists, and dystopia-philes. And in fact, Juarez's murder rate has decreased significantly since 2010, when over 3,000 murders occurred in the city limits. (I think under 600 last year.) People have used the word "revival" when they talk about Juarez now, and it seems to be at least somewhat true.

But if, like Matt tells Kate near the climax, "Medellin refers to a time" when the CIA had a degree of control over the cartels, this movie refers to a time when the drug cartels ran almost everything south of our border, and maybe, just maybe, the US suspended the rule of law to try and stop it.

And we're still at war, right?

13 Beliefs of Conservative White People

So in this wild time of political crossfire, I wanted to pin down what I identify as "conservative white beliefs." This way I can discuss and rebut them from a more rigorously logical standpoint. Here you go!

1.) I have not oppressed anyone

2.) Everyone is born equal and gets a fair shot at life (alternative version: “life isn't fair, so suck it up and deal with it”)

3.) No one should get a “leg up” in life (e.g., affirmative action, food stamps)

4.) Hard work will result in success

5.) The government should leave me, and everyone else, alone

6.) If you have a problem in life, don't complain—just take care of it

7.) Everyone is treated equally in America—if anything, whites have it harder

8.) What the world needs is law and order

9.) Whites are the ones who built this country, so it should be run according to Judeo-Christian principles (also, you should assimilate to this culture)

10.) If you have any problems in life, they're your own fault, and your own business

11.) A balanced federal budget is extremely important

12.) A de-regulated capitalist playing field will maximize the chances that hard work = success

13.) Receiving public assistance is shameful/wrong

Am I missing anything?

A Modern New York Horror Story About Friendship

So, wow. Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life was not what I expected, which means I'm dumb, because the cover photo of the book is a man's pained (or orgasmic--how bittersweet) grimace.

*Lots of spoilers ahead*

The story opens up with two friends looking for an apartment. They've known each other since college, they're basically broke, but they have all the giddiness and flexibility of youth, so they take a crappy, possibly-unsafe place on Lispenard Street, in Manhattan.

1. That's the title of the first and last sections: Lispenard Street. Here we get our first window into the lives of Willem Ragnarsson and Jude St. Francis, as well as the rest of their inner circle: Malcolm and JB.

Willem is a waiter who wants to be an actor; handsome, kind, Midwestern, but afraid of ending up like the middle-aged men who sort of morphed from "waiting tables until my big break" to just "waiting tables." Basically, everyone can't help but love Willem.

Jude is a new lawyer at the Attorney's Office, where he helps do the hard, unpleasant work of helping people find justice.

Malcolm is a grunt in an architecture firm, but has plans of running his own one day. He's biracial, rich, and fairly awkward and dithering--except when he's planning buildings.

JB is a struggling artist who wants to be a famous struggling artist. He is the loudest and brashest of the group, with Haitian parents, and is openly gay.

So here we are: four guys just living it up in NYC, happy and overworked and bohemian. They go to parties, laugh at dinners together, and share inside jokes. Sounds nice? Cool, because shit is about to become horrible.

The narrator's lens focuses tighter and tighter on Jude: skinny, handsome, pale, but also quiet, mysterious, full of unknowns. He walks with a limp--why? "Car accident," he says, but even his closest friends don't really know much about him. He is vague about his past, and because of this everyone has learned to respect his privacy, even if they do wonder.

You can guess by this point that the mysteries of Jude St. Francis are not all nice.

2. In Section II, "The Postman," we see the boys in college. JB nicknames Jude "the Postman" -- postmodern, post-racial (we don't know even know if he's really white), post-everything. He's an enigma, but they love him anyway.

Then we see Jude in law school, where he excels. I'm kind of fuzzy on the timeline, but he's also getting a master's in mathematics, because he's good at that, too. In fact, Jude is extremely organized. He can cook, garden, and fix things with amazing precision. He is highly perceptive, he remembers specific conversations years later, and he knows exactly what his friends like and don't like. More importantly, he actually gives his friends what they like and doesn't give them what they don't. Jude doesn't have a mean bone in his body.

He does, however, have body issues. He has "episodes" where his legs and torso lock up and he can't move, where he is in tremendous physical pain. Willem, who lives with Jude, has learned to help his roommate without asking, but very obliquely so as to spare Jude as much humiliation as possible. Because Jude is very private, and he seems sensitive to the idea that he is a burden because he is physically limited. "Disabled" is a word he refuses to consider, even though they they got the apartment at Lispenard Street in part because it had an elevator.

If I remember correctly, "The Postman" is also where we start getting flashes, just little clauses or prepositional phrases tucked away inside longer sentences, about Jude's past. Mentions of "the counselors" or "the home." A bit creepy, enough foreshadowing to taint the happy smiles of NYC life with a kind of nausea, like you're at the outer edge of the whirlpool but just starting to close in.

3. Section III, "Vanities," follows JB as he deals with a drug dependency, caused in part by a rich asshole named Jackson with whom he starts hanging out. It ends with him pathetic and high, horribly insulting Jude by mimicking his limp, until his friends (even Jude) get him help.

4. "The Axiom of Equality" is next, and is where things start to get really fucked up. The positive parts are Jude's relationship with one of his law teachers, a man named Harold, and his wife, Julia. The three of them begin a tentative relationship that resembles a family. Harold has lost a son in his first marriage, and this pain isn't the sole reason he tries to connect with Jude, but it is a part of it. Harold acts as a mentor/father figure, and eventually puts in the real paperwork to adopt Jude. Sweet!

But Jude has a hard time believing Harold really means this. Trust issues, perhaps? Well ... Here we see some extended scenes of Jude living with the Christian Brothers in a monastery. Now, I went to a high school run by Christian Brothers, and these guys, while sometimes scary to us, were a world apart from the ones we see here. This, however, does not mean these people can't exist, which is in fact one of the main ideas of this novel. Horrible people exist, but also beautiful people. Navigating between those two sets of humans is a painful, distressing process.

Basically, the Brothers beat and insult Jude constantly. I won't go into the grisly details (which this book does, to its credit), but suffice to say that shit is unpleasant in this religious center. It is all the more heartbreaking because Jude is an orphan, someone in most need of love and care.

There is one Brother who seems to like him, though. Brother Luke ...

Interleaved with these flashbacks are real-time scenes of the crew getting older. Willem becomes famous in his early thirties. Jude moves from his low salary but high-honor position at the Attorney's Office to Rosen Pritchard, a powerful law firm that defends corporations accused of wrongdoing -- not exactly defending the helpless. Harold is surprised at this choice, but continues to love and support his adopted son.

Now, you might be wondering, if you're a non-math person like me, what the axiom of equality is. It's simple. X = x. That's it. A thing is itself. This seemingly idiotic proof underpins a deep part of Jude's personality, which is the belief that he is rotten, filthy, undeserving of hope, love, regard, or help. Jude may be kind and selfless to all his friends, and even to strangers, but he is not kind to himself. In fact, he cuts himself, and viciously so. He cuts his arms, he cuts his legs. His legs often get infections, since they were seriously injured in his "car accident," but he still cuts there.

Harsh, right? These cutting scenes were the hardest thing I've ever had to read. I've read plenty of war novels, tales of abuse, etc., but the only material that came near this in terms of difficulty for me were American Psycho and Jennifer Egan's short story "Sacred Heart," which is also about cutting.

Self-harm, especially self-mutilation with a razor or blade, produces a deep, instinctive, nauseous reaction in me. It's physiological. I cross my arms, fold myself up, grit my teeth, and sort of tighten up my whole body. It's my version of "nails on a chalkboard." When someone mentions veins popping in a bicep, or talks about cutting up their forearms, I just feel sick. (American Psycho made me feel sick just because it was filled with horrific rape and violence.) I've never cut myself as a form of self-harm, but for some reason I'm really, deeply affected by the idea that someone could do it. It's one of the saddest things I can think of.

So reading extended passages about Jude systematically, secretly razoring his arms and legs was horrifying to me. I would put the book down, swallow my nausea, walk around for a second, and then make myself read. Because I wanted to understand what made this guy tick. Sure, the man was abused. He would've learned all sorts of unhealthy patterns from that. But why cutting? I learned that later.

First, we have to look at Jude's first relationship. This is a very unexpected and fast partnership, with a wealthy man named Caleb. Yes, a man; it seems Jude is gay.

When I got to this part, I expressed to my wife, who was also reading the book (but who read way ahead of me), my hope and joy that Jude would be with someone who loved him. Her reaction, a sort of adorable awkward laugh, told me instantly that my rosy idea of Jude's future was wrong.

Yep. Caleb is a psychologically manipulative, physically abusive man. We see flashbacks of Jude's childhood abuse, and then in real-time see Caleb punch and hit him. It's bad. It's really bad because we see how Jude accepts this as normal, rationalizes the violence, even grimly accepts it because it confirms his self-appointed status of "worthless."

I should mention here that Jude hates sex. His close friends have never seen him with a romantic partner, male or female, and of course they don't pry. His friends are even extremely careful about touching him at all. So sex, sex is way too much for Jude to handle. But he has sex with Caleb.

Eventually, Harold figures out something is wrong, and there is a tense scene where Jude's adoptive father protects Jude, and he chases a drunk, insulting Caleb away. Father stepping up for his son! Overcoming adversity! Except when Jude gets home, Caleb is there (he has a key to his apartment, after all, and since Jude is older now he lives in his own apartment, alone). Caleb strips Jude naked, marches him outside, and then drags him back in to violently rape him. The section ends with Caleb hurling Jude down a flight of stairs, which is when he has his mini-epiphany of x=x. "I was born for abuse," is the proof he affirms for himself.

Now we move to "The Happy Years," Section VI. How much happiness do you think is going to be in here? Well, some, luckily. But also a lot of shit.

Okay, so Jude recovers from the wounds he sustained from Caleb, but is severely emotionally scarred from it. It's one of his major "snapping points" in the book. He eventually attempts suicide, but one of his friends finds him. Here is where we really see that Jude has people who will love him no matter what. This is the sweetness at the bottom of the pain: Jude has people who love him.

The pain part has a lot to do with the monastery, but also with Brother Luke, a quiet man who treats a nine-year-old Jude kindly. You already know where this is going.

Luke abducts Jude and goes on a Lolita-like roadtrip to seedy motels, except unlike Humbert Humbert, Luke pimps his "beloved" out to other pedophiles for money. Yep. There is a lot of this. Jude is coerced into having sex, with Brother Luke as a warped version of a father figure, promising he will keep Jude "safe." This is one of the most harrowing and psychologically unsettling depictions of abuse I've ever seen, and the mind tricks are almost worse than the rape. "You were born for this," Luke tells him, which is beyond heartbreaking. He is training Jude to be a vehicle for sex, nothing more, while leading him on with visions of a perfect future where they live in a happy cabin together.

So of course because a child should never be put in circumstances remotely approaching this, Jude starts acting out. He throws himself against walls until he's bruised all over, which is bad for Luke's "business." So of course Luke teaches a now preteen Jude to cut himself, which doesn't show as much. Yeah, he literally "teaches" a kid how to self-harm as a means of letting off steam.

Luckily, Brother Luke dies. He kills himself when the cops catch up with him, which means cue Jude's scenes of the foster care system. It's ugly, too. He has counselors who rape him every night, and of course they verbally abuse him, too. They beat him, because why not? No one cares about a traumatized child with no parents.

At first, I was shocked, as you might be. After surviving Brother Luke, after being rescued by the police, the police deliver him into a system that exposes Jude to more pedophile rapists? I guess that's the sad truth.

But eventually Jude runs away from them and starts hitchhiking, where, yep, he prostitutes himself to adult men. He ends up getting sick and finding his way to a man named Dr. Traylor, a psychologist who keeps Jude in a basement and forces him to have sex. After an unknown number of weeks/months, the doctor tires of his prisoner and then tortures him in a field by chasing him with his car (Jude is on foot of course, almost naked). Then he actually runs over Jude's legs: this is Jude's "accident," the reason why he can't walk well, while he has agonizing physical episodes.

Damn. So, just take that in I guess. There's also some good stuff: Jude and Willem begin a relationship (Willem is revealed as bi, and doesn't think of himself of "gay" at all, or even "bi" for that matter). I was terrified when they first began dating, because I was sure Willem would suddenly snap and begin abusing Jude like all the other people I'd seen. But this was the difference. Willem was good, a good person, and he treats well. Not perfectly, but with love and care and attention.

During this whole time, too, Jude is making more and more money and rising in the ranks of Rosen Pritchard. He is a famous lawyer now, known for his ruthlessness, which is totally at odds with how everyone else knows Jude. And Willem is a world-famous megastar. (Malcolm and JB are also famous in their respective professions, architecture and art. Everyone gets fame!)

Okay, back to terrible things. Willem learns about, or more precisely finally confronts the fact that Jude cuts himself, and they try to deal with it, and with each other. This is when I actually understood--truly, emotionally understood--how cutting gave Jude a form of control. It was one thing he could do with his body that no one else had any say over. It was his.

Cutting is also a way to defuse the memories of his childhood, which has been popping up in his mind with increasing frequency. (This is the method of delivery of the flashbacks.) But we can sense that the memories aren't going away, that they are getting stronger, and no amount of cutting will help, although Jude certainly cuts himself a shit-ton.

But Jude and Willem's relationship lasts. Sex is a huge issue, but they have it, and Jude feels this is where he fails as a romantic partner. He just hates sex (with good reason for him). Jude blames himself for this, as he blames himself for his physical issues, for his difficulty with intimacy and opening up. He can't believe a good person like Willem would actually choose him. But still, he finds he relies on Willem, and even needs him, more than he's ever needed anyone before. Even when Jude has to amputate his legs from below the knee, Willem is there for him, caring for him, not judging him, not thinking he is deformed or filthy. The two of them truly love each other.

Then, of course, Willem dies. Malcolm dies, too, as they are both in a car when a drunk driver rams into them.

Cue Section VI, Dear Comrade. Jude obsessively attaches himself to everything Willem left behind -- his shirts, his voicemails, his movies (he was a famous actor, after all). He almost starves himself to death, but his friends and family intervene again to save him. It's way too late to be mentioning him, but Andy Contractor is a big form of help, because he's a doctor who's treated Jude since he ended his years-long cycle of abuse. He's one of the few people who knows about Jude's cutting, and at least some of his past. He's also the guy who performed Jude's amputations. But even this amazing man can't "fix" Jude. He just treats him as best he can. Jude, for the most part, tries to live in a delusion of believing Willem is alive. When he can't do that, he drugs himself and sleeps, but in his friends' final intervention, Jude realizes he needs to make a change. He actually tries to regain weight and engage with his loved ones and go to therapy. We see Jude actually trying to be alive.

Section VII, Lispenard Street. This section is told as a letter or message from Harold, as one or two previous chapters were. Here we learn how Jude commits suicide by filling his veins with air (an extremely painful way to die).

So, a few final notes. Some of the things Jude lives through seem melodramatic, Hollywood-like: a deranged psychologist tortures Jude and then runs over him intentionally with a car, in the middle of an empty field? But in a very horrifying way, none of this is really shown in Hollywood: Jude as a child having to have group sex with grown men. So there's this mix of disbelief (Can this really happen?) with reality (Here are the depths life can sink to.)

In the unlikely event you've read this, you may be wondering, "Why would I ever read this thing? It's depressing as fuck." And it is depressing as fuck. It feels like diving into a black pit of horrible feelings. But it also has a lot of sweetness: the friendship of Willem and Jude, of Harold, of Andy and Malcolm and even JB (although Jude and him end up having quite a strained relationship).

After reading this, I feel more emotionally connected to the reality of how hard it is to be disabled. While reading, I understood how I take the simple act of walking for granted. (Even Jude reflects on how he used to run without thinking about how amazing it was.) I also got a sliver of what it might be like to suffer truly horrible, life-changingly horrible abuse. It reminded me that whatever my problems and pains, it was not this. I don't mean to say it invalidated my problems, because it didn't -- just that it put them into perspective. I found this to be a positive thing.

It is easy to read A Little Life as a meditation on friendship, and it is that. It is also a reflection of villainy. Brother Luke and all the abusers/pedophiles are pretty one-dimensionally horrible. Dr. Traylor in particular is a psychopathic madman living under a quiet man's skin. What goodness we see in them is false, a front for violence and rape, and this is a lesson Jude struggles his whole life to understand. Is all goodness just fake? Willem and Harold stand as his major refutations to this idea, but it takes decades for Jude to even start believing it. Progress (both emotional and physical) is painfully slow with him, and it is one of the many things Jude berates himself about. In his mind, he is a weight on everyone around him, a freak, someone to be pitied.

So are there just "good" people and "bad"? I feel bad saying Yanagihara makes this simplistic claim, but it seems so. Several characters are complex--Willem, for one, who isn't always an angel--but you can pretty easily sift people into "good" and "bad" camps with this book. Friends like Andy may challenge, get frustrated with, and yell at Jude, but it's always appropriate and done with love. Harold in particular is the long-suffering saint, respecting Jude's privacy and lack of intimacy for literally decades without ever hurting him. A perfect dad, in other words.

Does reality contain these two pinnacles of humankind? Psychopaths and saints? Well, technically, yes. But thrust into this binary world is Jude and his terrifying sense of grayness, of confusion. Who is good and who is bad? As a survivor of abuse, Jude has to struggle for years to overcome the idea that he did not in fact deserve to be hurt, that he was not "born for" prostitution and rape. In other words, he has to relearn what good is, and this takes a hell of a long time. This is why he ends up with Caleb, another in a series of horrible men Jude had to contend with.

It's worth noting that this book is almost totally about men--male friendships, male relationships (including romantic), male heroes and male villains. These men are rich and poor, black, white, and multiracial, but their maleness stands out like a huge exclamation point throughout the whole novel. I'm sure masculinity is one of the book's themes, but that one doesn't really interest me right now. (Maybe on the second time around reading, if I can stand it.)

I feel like I'm shortchanging Willem in this whole piece, since he really comes through as Jude's anchor, the man who gives Jude a reason to live. Harold is amazing, but he's Jude's dad, and a husband is a whole other thing. Willem is a part of Jude, and Jude takes that feeling 100% seriously. The scenes of them traveling together, having quiet moments together, are beautiful, if tinged with melancholy because of all the horror buffering them.

This leads me to a note about the writing itself, which is cold and clear and fascinatingly nonjudgmental. I think it benefited the story an incalculable amount to write about horrible abuse with a neutral tone; I don't think I could have done it, restrain my hatred for those characters.

Legitimate reviews have noted the fact that the story seems to take place in a world devoid of major events like 9/11. There aren't many pop culture references, even though Willem works in Hollywood. I didn't mind the lack of trendy name-dropping, and in fact cutting that stuff out allowed me to focus on the relationships more. However, I do agree that this stylistic choice gave the story an otherworldly quality, a New York that is somehow divorced from New York, a ... fictional New York?

The metaphors and similes are simple but usually fitting, without being boring, which is hard. Murakami is someone else who is great at this. Yanagihara doesn't go in for high-flying eloquence a la Nabokov; she just lets the story tell itself. For some reason, the image of ice-cold water resonates with her words. Like she is filtering the story to you through a crystal-clear lake, making it actually refreshing, even when you're reading about the worst of humanity.

It is Jude, Willem, and Harold who seem to get the deepest treatment, who are the most focused-on, the most complex. Jude is undeniably the main character, and next is Willem, that patient, loving man who turns a best friendship into something more, and manages to maintain that until he dies. But the overall effect is one of an extended close-up on Jude, a shadowy, often-nightmarish, sometimes dreamlike exploration of his life. He seems so improbable a character because he is: a rich lawyer with a history of chronic sexual and physical abuse living with a superstar actor in New York City. Actually, when I say it like that, it seems slightly less impossible. And this is part of the point, to me: as someone who never lived through that kind of abuse, it's hard for me to really say, "Yes, that can happen. That happens." and believe it. This book helped me believe it. Do I think every abuse case involves being terrorized with a car? No. But does extreme abuse exist? Certainly. Even in my personal life, I've heard stories so unsettling that it makes me turn pale to think about them. So in other words, Jude's story isn't hyperbolic.

Once I accepted this, I accepted Jude as a person much more deeply. I granted him the right to have his problems, because the things that caused those problems were so severe. I was on his side when he didn't want to have sex, even with Willem. Having read hundreds of pages of Brother Luke, I was like, "Dude, if you never want to have sex again, don't." But Jude, always trying to please, makes himself sleep with Willem, at least for a while.

It is this trying that is most noble and heartbreaking about Jude. He pushes on with sheer force of will, trying to live and be happy even though life gave him fifteen years of unfiltered hell as soon as he was born. And, sadly, Jude is overwhelmed by his life (past and present) and kills himself. But by the point that was revealed, I was prepared for Jude's death. I knew the book was going to have him die, in part because the title is A Little Life. It's going to show me the end of a life, as well as the meat of it.

But I was also prepared for Jude's death because as he gets older, we see his slow, unwilling realizations that he is getting closer to it. We see him reluctantly accept that he can't walk anymore, then as he reluctantly accepts that he will have to amputate his legs. The hardest thing to accept, for me as the reader, is the idea that Jude won't ever be able to "get better" mentally. He will always be traumatized.

Even writing those words feels like a betrayal. I'm not a psychologist, but I work in a psychology lab, and it feels like undermining my profession to say that a person can't get better. But the book made me reflect on how hard it is to "get better," to improve and process painful emotions and thoughts, to change maladaptive behaviors and replace them with healthy ones, to learn to be more intimate and honest, to practice self-care instead of self-harm. All these things involve effort and discomfort, and in Jude's case, it was simply too much. His story is sadly not an uncommon one.

But his life, while he lived it, had its periods of beauty and peace. And while they were few and far between, I was grateful to get them; I clung to them, stupidly, thinking, "Now. Now is when Jude's life will only have good things. Because he deserves that."

Well, clearly life never gets to a point of "only good things." Jude always has struggles, always has pain, even when on the outside he looks like a rich white lawyer with his own fancy apartment in New York. He looks like someone who is privileged, and he is: he attains real wealth, unlike 99% of humanity, and he has friendships. Jude knows and understands this, which is part of the sadness, too. He keeps telling himself, "I should be happy. I have so much. There are people with so little." But that way of thinking will never heal you.

Speaking of healing, by the end of the book, I no longer cringed when reading about cutting. I guess I just got used to it.

You could make a case for the book being about sex, or sadness, or trauma, or the difficulty of recovery. But I suppose to me it feels more like a horror story. To be in those rooms, to feel a small fraction of what a child living that life would feel, and to know that somewhere right now that could be--was--happening to a child, is the definition of horror. It's horror because it implicates me, as someone with privilege, as one of the happy people who doesn't understand Jude's silences. But if Jude never was able to "improve," he didn't blame others for their happiness. In fact, he wanted it for them without resentment.

Jude reminds me of that darkly humorous quip from Kafka: "Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us."

In Christianity, Jude is one of Jesus' apostles, called "The Saint for the Hopeless and Despaired." Other titles I saw are "Patron Saint of the Impossible" and "Patron Saint of Lost Causes." Desperate people pray to St. Jude. And St. Francis of Assisi is associated with animals, nature, and poverty, as well as an order of monks. I'm not sure if Yanagihara was referencing this St. Francis, or Francis of Paola (who created the Jesuits, which includes Jesuit Brothers), or someone else, or no one. Still, it is impossible not to hear a ring of Christian sainthood, especially the martyrdom flavor of sainthood, in Jude St. Francis.

But enough of sadness, right? I just finished reading this book and needed to get some of it out of my system. I feel better now, but I feel better for having lived with Jude, for having had him percolate through me and leave some of his deep, violent sadness behind. It's not so bad as it sounds; in fact, it makes me feel like more of a real person. The story of someone's painful life and suicide can be uplifting, connected as it is to the fortune and love of having true family and friends. Even if the ratio of dark to light is heavily lopsided, A Little Life ends up on the side of life, of moving on. Maybe it's just the closure that comes from seeing the main character die, that sense of finality, but I feel mildly hopeful right now, like something meaningful was completed. For all the book's inherent grayness, the ending wasn't gray. It didn't leave me hanging. Everything was explained (in graphic detail).

So it makes sense that a book called A Little Life is comprehensive, even if I kept feeling that so much was being left out--more dinners, more parties, more stories of pain. I kept thinking, "I really don't know these guys all that well yet, even though I'm 600 pages in," and then most of them died. You can make an obvious link to real life here, if you want. That sometimes-maddening sense of too much and too little, the difficulty of ever truly knowing a human, while also being privy to things you may wish you hadn't known.

Harold doesn't truly learn what happened to Jude in his early life until the last few pages. Then, after his adopted son's suicide, he finds a letter Jude had written him years ago and hid in his (Harold's) bookshelf. It details all the horrible stuff I've just recounted to you, and this is where Yanagihara leaves us: or not quite.

She takes us back to Lispenard Street, to a scene when Jude and his dad were walking around and found their way back to it, even though Jude didn't live here at this point -- he was older and richer, the two of them were just reminiscing. Jude tells him the story of how once, Willem and he had jumped off the apartment building's roof onto the rickety fire escape, since they and their friends had been locked up there by accident. (We saw this scene in real-time earlier in the book.)

"And then he did." These are the last words Yanagihara gives us. I interpret them in at least two ways: 1.) then he did tell Harold the story, and 2.) then he did jump off the roof, i.e., kill himself (not that he did so then, but the wording implies his suicide).

Well, fuck. I'm tired. Thank you, Jude St. Francis, for showing me you can live even when you're in agony--if only for your friends. You might have killed yourself, but that doesn't make you a failure; it doesn't make your life unimportant, by any means. It just means you lived, and then you died.

Big Soft Mushy Skull

I am a giant baby.

Zadie

“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” ― Ann Richards

I always love reading Zadie Smith. Her books never seem to go anywhere, but then they do. (I realize that's a frustratingly obvious sentence, but it's true.)

Having just finished her newest book Swing Time, I don't know yet what to think about it. The writing is simple, conscious of our era of email addiction, and the chapters are short. The book is divided into sections with titles like "Early Days" or "Early and Late Days," which seem haphazard. They feel like loose ways of arranging narrative based on however Zadie felt at the time ... and for the most part, strangely, I am OK with this. I like to see Mrs. Smith wander, to think, to go basically nowhere plot-wise. Some people will hate this -- there are those who always despise stories that trade thought for plot. Such readers believe stories with no orthodox arc are the "wrong type" of story, maybe because these structures are atypical, challenging, which smacks of elitism.

But this may be a book written in "elitist" style that also addresses elitism directly as a theme. The main character, who is somehow not ever named, grows up with a black Jamaican mother and a white father in 1980s London. She partners up with a domineering, vain friend named Tracey, who is also biracial, and who loves to dance.

The art of dance is woven into the story with joy and honesty. It's really fun to read any passage in Swing Time that talks about dance, because it's so clear Zadie had fun writing it.

The protagonist (I'll call her NR, for narrator) has a naively passionate boss, a famous pop star named Aimee, who sees her self as a dancer since her voice is mostly produced in the studio. She becomes taken with the idea of founding a women's school in Africa, and then, with the whim of the obscenely rich, just makes it happen. (The country is not named, and the Western habit of lumping all African countries into the term "Africa" is also talked about in the book. )

This "humanitarian" trip opens the door to some lively and peaceful African dancing scenes, not the least of which is an elaborately costumed man starting a party in the street before taking the young village boys off to be ritualistically circumcised. (You don't see any snipping, luckily.)

There is also a sort of love triangle, which is not that interesting. From what I have read of Zadie, her attempts at outright "plot" tend to be her least inspired writing. You get the sense that she feels she "has to" include some degree of conflict or arc, or that her publisher/agent/whoever has begged her to add some "momentum" to the mix. The people involved in the triangle are Aimee, an African teacher named Lamin, and an African woman named Hawa. The latter two characters seem sketchily drawn, distant in some way. Of course, part of the story involves Westerners' pathetically offensive ideas about Africa (i.e., lack of knowledge), but Lamin never really seems to form as a character. It might be the 1st-person POV format, meaning we're always stuck in NR's mind, but people like Lamin and Hawa feel more like narrative objects, moved about for this or that pre-arranged purpose. (And here I said there wasn't much plot.)

This distant treatment is ironic in one way, because the concept of treating people like objects crops up in the book, most overtly with Aimee's selfish treatment of all her staff: they exist for her. (Of course, I could also just be ignorant/unsuited to African characters, and am missing something integral here, which is not dissimilar to NR's African experience.)

At many points I found myself asking, "Why is this happening?" while reading Swing Time, and the happy answer was, "I have no idea, but it's so pleasant I don't care."

NR herself seems sketchy at times, although we get tons of her memories, mainly from childhood through adolescence. She is very inward-focused, tending to avoid people, but the people she does interact with fill up her life and affect it deeply.

In fact, when I think about it, NR is often dominated by others. Her mother is highly outspoken, stern, and studies constantly to become a member of the "intellectual" class, a pursuit which often matters more than the day-to-day feats of mothering. For the majority of their relationship, she dominates her daughter with unending streams of political theory, history, and polemic. Then, too, a young (and teenage, and even adult) Tracey dominates NR, telling her what to do, oppressing her with more words, forcing her to play second-banana to this outspoken, but perhaps equally insecure girl.

Then, of course, there is Aimee, whose selfishness is staggering, although not so staggering that I can't relate to her. All three of these women have moments of beauty and integrity, often coupled with the signature boldness and defiance that seem to link them all together.

And speaking of selfishness, even NR grows aware of her own privileged behavior, especially when it's held up against the impoverished African villages. (For instance, she wastes an entire liter of water flushing a cockroach down the toilet, knowing people had to walk several miles to fetch it. Later, there is also a discussion over whether the village should even be called "impoverished," when family values and community seem to be so strong ... there is more than one kind of wealth, as one character says, and constantly viewing African countries as categorically "poor" is its own form of privilege/racism.)

For the most part, though, NR's mom, Tracey, and Aimee shut out NR's needs and focus on themselves. They are casually selfish, whether it's the Jamaican immigrant mother who becomes an MP, or an aging Australian icon.

In another way, though, NR's life is very lucky. She has relationships with both parents, even if the conversations can be strained. Tracey, on the other hand, was raised by a single mother; her dad is a deadbeat criminal who avoids any but the most casual relationship. NR is also fortunate enough to attend college, where she doesn't do much except smoke weed and break up with an another oppressive figure, a young black man obsessed with numerology. Then she gets a cushy job at a TV station (this section is somehow exciting even though she does nothing) and eventually her position with Aimee, which involves both drudgery and luxury: she must do all the grunt work to care for Aimee, but she also benefits from private flights and worldwide travel.

NR's transformation from slightly unfocused, bookish teen to stressed-out millennial international white collar worker (there's a mouthful) feels strange, because it's not too much of a transformation. She doesn't change much in terms of behavior, except for becoming more attached to her phone. She is still loath to create relationships, she still finds it hard to speak to her mother, and she is still bafflingly obsessed with her friend Tracey, who achieves minor stardom in bit dance roles before fizzling out into an Internet troll.

It is this relationship with Tracey that is meant to be the core one, the fulcrum on which everything turns, but why? All because of a random moment in which a childhood friendship sparked? Because they were both half-white and half-black and lived close to each other and both wanted to dance (although only Tracey was good)? Maybe that's enough reason. After all, our earliest friendships start by the chance of convenience (neighbors, or a shared class), and they can embed themselves in our brains forever by the mere fact of occurring when we're young and still in development.

The meaning of the Tracey relationship is puzzling, and yet, as I've said, also comforting. Zadie is a humble master of adding detail and fleshing out characters' lives without you realizing it: before I knew it, several hundred pages had passed, and I felt well-versed in Tracey's anxieties and dreams, her wish to be seen as posh and elite when she is young, and her intense teenage acting-out. The transformation into furious online verbal abuser isn't handled directly -- in the frequent time shifts that mark the book, an older Tracey merely reappears as an unemployed, vocal believer in government conspiracies. This time-shifting partly contributes to that "distant" feeling hanging around several characters (Tracey is saved from this by the heavy focus on her childhood, but Lamin and Hawa, who enter the book later in the game, are not so lucky).

Now, haven't I contradicted myself? Zadie fleshes characters out, but also makes them feel distant? I think this paradox is true when speaking about her people. There is a clinical side to Zadie's writing, the scholar or academic, and at times there is a lack of emotion that negatively affects the whole "fun" part of reading a book. NR spends a decent amount of time being in a kind of anemic mildly bewildered shock, not precisely emoting, more chronicling what passes before her. This does fit in with her history as someone passed-over, relegated to sidekick, but it's not always enjoyable to read. (Which brings up the debate between logical consistency and enjoyability in writing, which is for another time ... basically is it better to create a work that makes "sense," or one that does its job of entertaining?)

I feel like my essay is a poor imitation of Zadie's book, because it's taking its time, wandering, while sort of hoping deep-down it will make a point. And make no mistake, Zadie does make a point. Her ending is beautiful; it was totally expected and unexpected (paradox alert) to me, and most importantly, it took me from feeling kind of uncertain and almost irritated to feeling thrilled. Zadie is capable of this: she can lull you into a bemused state of quasi-meditation, and then shatter your little brain with a beautiful phrase, a heartfelt action from a character. Her ending made me believe in things, gave my own tepid brain hope for another day, which is worth the admission price right there.

Zadie cares, and this caring shows through in her people. The portrait she paints of NR's mother, for instance, is realistic and beautiful. An admirable woman with her own domineering faults, a leftist-literature-reading protester who can defend her daughter fiercely from school administrators, but who also passes harsh judgements about others, including NR herself. These judgements haunt NR through the book, and it is to the book's credit that they do: Mrs. Smith does an excellent job of reproducing the anxieties of the human mind, of images and memories that more or less live inside you all the time, defining the system by which you see the world, until, little by little, perhaps you can break away.

We see very little of the breaking away, at least until the final pages, but like I said: the ending was excellent. I didn't expect it to be so good, actually, and I know I'm hyping this up so people who read it may think "ah, I don't see the big deal" because Zadie never goes for over-dramatized catharsis, or a Hollywood explosion. What she does do is tweak the proceedings a bit, making the story move into uncharted territory. Zadie, to me, seems fascinated by the world, and all the strange things in it, and it is comforting (and mind-expanding) to watch her wander around with a magnifying glass and ask questions.

There's so much more to this novel, especially with regards to its treatment of race, but I'll leave you with a maybe-not-exceptionally brief coda: the title Swing Time comes from a Fred Astaire movie. As a child, NR becomes obsessed with Fred and his dance moves, even though Tracey isn't impressed by the oldtime routines. The incorporation of film, video, and music into the book is another cool (and odd) component, since there are quite a few scenes when NR is just summarizing what's happening onscreen. The idea of writing about film (ekphrasis, my favorite word!) is nothing new, but when I saw Zadie Smith in Washington, DC, I heard her say she didn't feel the need to elaborate on the context of Fred Astaire's movies or Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video because we live in a world where we can Google anything. In this way, the Internet is a weird extension of the book, since it was written with the awareness of our technological ease in looking things up.

This might seem like a throwaway stylistic choice, but it hearkens back to the old days of a common reading list, when you could drop Shakespeare quotes in public dialogue and know that many people would understand it. (To be fair, back in the day it was exclusively wealthy white guys talking to other middle-class-and-above white guys about their commonly shared learning, but you get what I'm saying.) Except here, though, is a 21st-century version, a common language that exists outside of our heads, on the Internet. We might not know the quote Zadie is talking about, but we can look it up in two seconds on our smartphones. We can watch the videos she's describing and add to our experience of the novel.

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Pick One Thing And Do It Every Day (And Share It)

1

Real men don’t shake their babies! Glen Margery fondled his bald spot in the clinic's waiting room, avoiding posters of tight-jawed airmen and their pink, helpless infants that plastered the wall across from him. Only the Air Force needed a PSA about throttling your kid; Marines didn't crack like that. No, they handled their mission, any mission, and just complained instead. At least the men who hadn’t trampled the Scarlet and Gold to babysit missiles for the Army.

Got a problem? We’ll listen! Stupid to even come in. Jersey City therapy meant a smack in the face—and mom expected a kiss after. Glen scrawled over the intake forms with a dried-up pen, which managed to use black ink, at least. Just not enough.

Emergency Walk-In, 0800, 9/12/2013.

Thanks to the government's heartfelt investment, Heiwa Mental Health offered concrete walls and flimsy, waveform chairs made of plastic, which dug into Glen’s shoulders no matter how he angled himself. Add to that the bathhouse humidity, beads of sweat drenching his armpits, and he felt he was stewing in hell: even from his bunk to the BX, he got soaked walking this damn island. On postcards Okinawa City might look like paradise, but it was just another shithole with coconuts as far as he was concerned.

Have you ever used any mental health services before?

He was actually here, filling out this trash. Answer: No. He wanted to keep his job, thanks. Any moron knows to lie. Even though command had busted him from staff sergeant to PFC, he'd still prefer to run out his contract with minimum hassle. Didn’t want to get med-boarded like some stunad who couldn’t hack it. Although what would he do, back home? Fix cars? Glen had no talent for repairs.

History of mental illness? Physical?

Some type of brain tumor removed when he was seven. No sense putting that down. Cost his mom a gigantic pile of money, she never let him forget. Still got stress headaches.

The pimply airman beside him hacked a generous sample of phlegm into his Kleenex. Glen shied as far away as possible without physically picking up his seat and moving. From under the other man’s chair a huntsman spider, brown and big around as a playing card, peeped out and skittered toward the reception desk. Bugs: surreptitiously, Glen pawed his bald spot.

“Margery.”

He stomped to the front. Keep a lookout for that eight-legged monster.

“Those guys are everywhere,” said the tech behind the Plexiglas screen. “At least they’re not giant centipedes, right? It’s just down the hall, by the way. Private.”

He saw the look, the little flash that pegged him as an old guy in a young guy’s rank. I’m bad news, fine, get it out of your system. You don’t have to tell me how fucked up I am. But I iron my uniform—and crease it—when ninety-nine percent of these joes look like they slept in a ditch. I never saw any of them walking long-ops, they shouldn’t get excuses. I'm a grunt: 4th Battalion 1st Marines. The Army is my retirement.

“Dr. Tamashi’s down the hall, on the left there.”

No reply; don’t give him the satisfaction. The door was open so he shut it behind him and settled into another wave-chair in a cramped yellow room, which smelled like old paper and deodorant.

Dr. Tamashi was a black lady. Not Okinawan. Her body hid behind a glacé copper suit jacket. The dark, straightened hair to her shoulders reminded him of someone special.

“You mingle in with the tribe?” was his first question.

“Excuse me, Private?”

“Did you, uh, find yourself a man here?” He nodded toward her nameplate, as if sharing a joke. Caught the spark of unease in her eyes.

“My husband is from Okinawa, yes. But I want to hear about what brought you in today.”

Glen shifted sideways, his body diagonal in a way that could only make him feel uncomfortable. “You know those local guys all get diseases from hookers.”

The woman kept herself expertly still, like an honor guard counting to twenty-one. Her eyes were chill, hazel cinders in her head. “Are you speaking about my husband?”

“No, no I just mean. I mean I see them. They all sneak out and find their strange, just like the guys here. I don’t know what they get mad at us for.”

Tamashi set her pen on the lacquered desk and blinked, slowly, her face welcoming in its repose but also impassive, like her eyes wouldn't let you through to her wounded soul. “Do you enjoy sex with prostitutes?”

“Naw. I like other things.”

She folded her hands into a prayer position. As if counting the degrees, she leaned forward until her chin rested against the gold tips of her fingers. “Such as?”

These doctors always great at killing time. I was fine with it too, in al-Anbar, he wanted to say. Nothing but sand-colored houses, a few shrubs; gully full of dust. Then a bomb chops your friend up into brisket, you could ship him home in a Pyrex dish.

“Been drinking more.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Been here for a year and a half. I was over at Fort Epps, before.”

Tamashi lowered her hands so they hovered just above the desk, displacing energy. “You’ve been drinking more than you wanted.”

“I did back home, too. Worse here.”

“Overseas can take a toll.”

“No shit. Ma’am. In Iraq, in ’06, they’d just mortar the hell out of your dinky building. That wasn’t hard, you just took it. But sitting here … ”

“Reaching out isn’t easy. It’s brave, no matter what your squadmates say.”

“I been shot at, blown up. Got hit by a Jeep once.”

“That sounds harder than I can imagine.”

“Yeah, but it had a point, right? Kill Mohammad. This is just fucking around, cooped up where everyone’s too polite to curse but they flip you the bird as soon as you turn around. At least in Fallujah they had the balls to spit in your face if they didn’t like you.”

Tamashi nodded with the start of a genuine smile: white, blamelessly white teeth. “Cultural differences are frustrating.”

“As hell, ma’am. Excuse me. They are, and I don’t know if that’s it, if that’s why I’m this way, or what, but I can’t take it.”

“If you’re this way?”

“You know, drinking. I don’t know. What do you tell someone like me?”

The lady pressed herself snugly into her chair and fixed him with a level gaze. Looking back at her, dead-on, Glen detected how broad in the shoulder she really was, never mind the coat. Handle herself in a fight.

“What would you tell yourself?” said Tamashi.

“The hell is that? I’d say, ‘Go ask the damn doctor.’ ”

Dana signaled to him with a pop of her eyebrow, as if to prove she was human, too, not some rational droid with the proper psychology training. “Just humor me, Glen. I’m only here to help.”

He felt himself turning pink like one of those babies on the wall posters outside. “Well, shit. Help for me is your medical opinion, or whatnot.”

“I get that. And I want to know, what’s yours on the issue?”

Glen touched the back of his head. Was she spinning this bullshit on purpose? “On what issue? I don’t know what you mean. You’re just asking me what I came here to ask you, right?”

She bugged her eyes, off-guard for a moment, and he stifled the laugh that came welling up.

“On the, uh, drinking,” she said.

“Right.” Now he was comfortable. He sagged into his chair, laced all ten fingers together like he decided who was healthy and who was infected. Plus that other girl was beautiful, much better than the doctor. “I’d say stop it.”

Back straight in her fake-leather conference seat, Tamashi answered with silence. Trying to knock his balance, establish dominance. He squeezed the thin metal armrest while she breathed in deliberate streams, out and in.

“What steps did you take to quit?” she said at last: victory.

“Uh, zero, ma’am. Once I tried the Twelve Steps, AA, after I left the Marines. But it didn’t really do shit.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged, regarding her with sluggish, half-lidded eyes. “I didn’t change any. Sit in a circle. I joined the Army.”

“You thought it might help you.”

“It’s a job. I clean fucking missile trucks, I don’t snuggle up with my rifle against my lips like I used to. Back then I shot people. Once in a while people shot back, but usually they just ran like pussies. What can I say, I won.”

“You came out alive.”

“Damn straight. I’d go again if I could. I put in for another round, but with the way things are going, I’m not hopeful. All this peace shit.”

“You’re not hopeful to go back.”

“Yeah, aren’t you listening, even?”

His tone hurt her morale, which made him feel like cackling, but he flinched when he saw her recognize the play with a subtle tightening of her jaw. What did he want, crawling in like this?

“I’m just trying to understand, Private Margery.”

“Aren’t you supposed to, already? You’re the professional.”

She spread out her hands and stared at him frankly in a way that made him skittish, Mom's inadequate kid. “We’re all just here trying.”

Glen smiled because he’d seen death, had made it happen, because that stasis he’d found through shooting a man had rushed back to let him dig up his heart and fill it with intimacy he couldn’t hope to explain to a civilian, or a pogue, even. “That would’ve got you sniped with an SKS, Russian carbine. Or a Mosin-Nagant, and they’re a hundred years old. You do or you’re a Maxi-stain in the sand, know what I mean?”

“Life is dangerous.”

“Life is hell—ma’am.”

“And the drinking’s made it worse.”

He screwed up his eyes. He burped, pretty politely, into his hand. “Worse than hell. Huh. I don’t know. I don’t know, I guess. You got any kids?”

Tamashi shook her head.

“I have two with the ex. When I see them you’re supposed to be happy, but they’re just little shits. I don’t know what they want. What the hell do you do with two kids? People here have two, three, a hundred kids, and they look happy as pigs in trash. What about me?”

“You feel differently.”

“I feel like beating my kids to death with a rock.”

Tamashi nodded and clasped her hands, elbows slowly grinding into the desk, yet concealed by the sleeves of her coat. Glen stared her in the eyes and found deep, receptive blackness, where before some screen or armor had blocked him.

“Children are pains in the ass.”

“I just feel like beating the hell out of them. I never hit them, though. I could always say that. No matter what else I did. I did a lot.”

“You can be proud of that.”

He looked at his thumbs. Supposed to mark us as human, but all they do is make it easier to jam our hands where they don’t belong. He wanted to cry; held it down.

“I’d be proud if I was fuckin’ dead.”

“Do you wish you were?”

Glen sucked his teeth. He forced the grief into his belly like he’d choked down a spiky conch shell. “No, I guess not. I’m not going to stick a knife in my neck, if that’s what you mean. Too coward. There was one guy tried to off himself in School of Infantry, blew out half his teeth and went blind in one eye. He was a fucking private. What do you do then? You don’t have a GI bill. I bet he’s in a tower somewhere ringing a bell. Jesus.”

“You don’t look to killing yourself as a solution.”

“See, ma’am, I don’t see solutions. My mom, she talked about the Judgment a lot. She'd turn the water on—cold, sometimes she'd throw in ice cubes just to piss me off—and then stick me in the bath and crack me upside the head with a wet towel when I fucked up. I always thought it was funny. She’d say something like, ‘Got to cool off that devil in there! That devil’s just running through your blood!’ I’d laugh in her face, and she'd beat the living crap out of me. That’s my problem, I guess. I'm rotten.”

“The way you say it, you sound hopeless about changing.”

He laughed again, eager now for a cigarette. “Sure, why not.”

Tamashi folded one hand over the other. She smiled in empathy, which he hated. “It’s tough to feel there’s nothing to look forward to.”

“Well, I didn’t say that.” Glen bit his lip. Pink knapsack, plump legs. Eyes wide and bright with that perfect joy. “I’m afraid I’m going to do something very bad.”

The doctor swallowed his fear with a trained look of caution that rendered her beautiful, as boldly and naturally attractive as her patient appeared unfortunate. “What do you mean?”

Glen forced his own smile into a frown, but realized they amounted to the same thing. Brief change in the status quo. He looked away and didn’t talk.