The Bookhouse Boys discussion
Affliction Schedule/Discussion
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Thankfully, this book's about actual people, so Matt and Jason are allowed to care about them. *:^{)
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Dave wrote: "Thankfully, this book's about actual people, so Matt and Jason are allowed to care about them."Matt and Jason are pro-human. It's been well-established that Dave is racist; now we know his animus is toward the race with belly buttons. ;)
Based on my memory of the movie, Affliction should also be the biggest downer of a book since Ragtime, the last book all three of you enjoyed. Hmmm....
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Oy! I have cared about a warren of rabbits, a woodsman made out of tin, and a giant insect-like creature that used to be a man.
Being human isn't a requisite for caring. Being dull and insipid, however, well, that makes me wish that Judge Holden and his boys would come riding in to clean house. :whaat:
Jim wrote: "Based on my memory of the movie, Affliction should also be the biggest downer of a book since Ragtime, the last book all three of you enjoyed. Hmmm.... "
I will be picking up my copy tomorrow. I am looking forward to it.
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No... it also doesn't have 3 lifelong friends and lovers being torn apart to have their organs harvested. Yeesh.
Jim wrote: "Based on my memory of the movie, Affliction should also be the biggest downer of a book since Ragtime, the last book all three of you enjoyed. Hmmm.... "
Funny, I didn't think Ragtime was much of a downer... Affliction likely will be, though, you're right. :)
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Me neither. I thought it was quite comical, in many ways.
I'm only a couple chapters into Affliction, but it's already living in me. I am anxious to talk about the same stuff you mentioned, Dave, and some of the passages about small-town life that just about gave me goosebumps (I'm a survivor).
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I think we got our wish for a book we all like. Affliction has completely sucked me in.
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It's funny, as I've been reading I've been counting all the problems we've been listing as deal-breakers between us on the past few books and how Banks doesn't do any of them. It's like a clinic on how to write an absorbing novel:
1. Complex, three-dimensional characters: check
2. Rich, well-constructed writing style: check
3. Uncommon insights into humanity: check
4. A full-bodied depiction of a time and place: check
5. The sort of careful craft and consideration that makes the reader confident it's all going to be paid off in the end: check
I'm having a really difficult time only reading a chapter a day... :)
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Yes, yes, yes! Banks litters gut-punch observations throughout his storytelling. That was the one thing, you may recall, that I liked about Updike's Rabbit book: the razor-sharp insight into human behavior and attitudes.
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This is the attribute that most connects my favorite writers/writing.
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:^)
I've been wholly immersed in this book. For the first time in a while, I lamented my old single days when I could nurse a beer or two outside a pub and read for hours and hours in the nice weather without interruption. Oh, well. At least it ain't snowin', fer crissakes.
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Like a gem. A perfectly cut gem. That, when you stop to admire it, crushes your soul.
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http://lilibetsnellings.tumblr.com/po...
Wish I'd been there to get the full show.
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Cool that it's a 1st edition, but mine's more than a bit scuffed up. Oh well, still reads well! :)
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I love that Banks (through Rolfe) deftly characterized LaRiviere's secretary by describing her overt disdain she had for Wade. Those little moments and the way they are explained or rationalized have really made this book for me.
As you may have noticed, I intentionally did not decode the toothache, because I'd like yr 2 cents.
Let me know what else we neglected (it's gonna be a loooooooong list).
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I'll throw something out for discussion that we didn't get to: the way Jill hides behind her tiger mask, literally, the way it reflects her discomfort with the town and/or her father, and possibly how it reflects Wade's inability to "see" his daughter for who she is now.
There's a particular passage where Banks describes, not for the first time, how crappy Jill's costume is; Wade looks at the band cutting into the back of Jill's head, and is nearly overcome with an urge to sob...which he decides is love for his daughter, but I suspect is something quite different.
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Oy. You're right. I need to make notes!
Jason wrote: "Wade looks at the band cutting into the back of Jill's head, and is nearly overcome with an urge to sob...which he decides is love for his daughter, but I suspect is something quite different.
This was my favorite passage from the book so far. I'm glad that you brought it up. I find this to be the most emotionally complex and "realest" moment so far. It's so layered with nuance, possibility, and truth, that I decided not to even broach the subject. I think that this is the key to Wade's existential and emotional state and every time I tell you why he felt that urge, the answer'll be different. A couple of examples (I think this is kind of a Rorschach test, btw):
- The utter disappointment at how the evening has not met his mental image of how it would be.
- The crushing feeling a parent gets now and again when they realize how vulnerable their kid is.
- Seeing her with her little-kid hair and sh*tty costume makes him think of himself as a child. I know that 'Jesus, where did the time go?' feeling when you feel like you were just a kid yrself not too long ago; now you're old and hopeless/dreamless
- The band in the hair is the seam in life. The imperfection in the costume that is the imperfection in Wade's plan, Wade's job, Wade's role in the town, Wade's relationship with his daughter, etc. It snowballs.
I could go on, but have to go. This is a Chinese puzzle of a moment in the book that made me declare Banks a literary genius.
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The early moments with Jill are a definite motif in the book. They crop up in Wade's thoughts and conversation with his brother repeatedly. Halloween night was definitely his breaking point (whatever that means... still not quite clear yet). This is the first thing Rolfe responds to... Wade calls him to go over the usual boring bullshit, but when he starts telling the story about Halloween, Rolfe sits rigid and listens. There must be something undisclosed in Wade's voice, a tension there; maybe Rolfe recognizes his father?
Banks' power as a writer is apparent in the scene with Jill for me because I don't have kids, but I still felt it. I felt his disappointment completely, in himself, in the situation, and even, yes, in his daughter. It's a hell of a thing to make somebody really feel what it's like to live through a moment you've never actually lived through. That's what literature's supposed to be: not a reminder, but a revelation.
Flicking through the reviews of the novel on Goodreads, I think it might be interesting to talk more about the murder "mystery" aspect. This book feels very much like a character study to me, but I can see how it may have ended up on crime fic lists. We're only 1/3 of the way through the book, but the murder seems (at least to me) almost incidental at this point compared to our delving into the character of both Wade and Lawford.
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- The crushing feeling a parent gets now and again when they realize how vulnerable their kid is.
- Seeing her with her little-kid hair and sh*tty costume makes him think of himself as a child. I know that 'Jesus, where did the time go?' feeling when you feel like you were just a kid yrself not too long ago; now you're old and hopeless/dreamless
- The band in the hair is the seam in life. The imperfection in the costume that is the imperfection in Wade's plan, Wade's job, Wade's role in the town, Wade's relationship with his daughter, etc. It snowballs.
Great observations. I hadn't considered all the possible permutations of that passage before...my interpretation was basically a combination of your first two points. He sees her tiny, nervous frame covered with that ridiculous costume and he feels embarrassment, nervousness and tenderness all at once.
I can't help thinking that the fact that she barely takes off the mask once he gives it to her, and that he describes the back of her head, also intimates that he fears he doesn't really know her anymore, and that it will only get worse. She's already guarded and distant around him and she's only 10 years old.
Dave wrote: "There must be something undisclosed in Wade's voice, a tension there; maybe Rolfe recognizes his father?
A chilling thought.
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Did you know Jupiter's in the seventh house of Uranus? You can tell 'cause all three of us freakin' love the book. This is a rock-solid episode of the BBoys.
Enjoy!
http://bookhouseboyspodcast.podomatic...
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Banks is also some kind of narrative genius for maintaining the level of interest and tension that he does throughout 350 pages with very little action and dialogue that I would say leans towards the side of sparse. I think Rolfe is what enables him to do this... just a fantastic use of the 1st person narrative voice. He comes across as an omniscient, 3rd person narrator so often that you sometimes forget that the vast majority of his text has been cobbled together piecemeal after the fact, or that he's gotten so deep into Wade's thoughts and motivations without the benefit of being able to ask him directly about any of it. His insights into Wade feel like they should be unreliable, but they seem so accurate they're a little scary. He also manages to flesh out bit characters with equally penetrating insight left and right. For instance, in this third section, he threw in, almost as an afterthought, a paragraph about Jimmy's (o-ver-time) arrangement with his family, this sad but mutually beneficial relationship where, in trying like hell to avoid one another, he works a lot of overtime and they stay warm and fed. I mean, who delves into that sort of dynamic with possibly the most inconsequential character of the book?
Hopefully some more folks will read the book and chime in soon...
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I just read that this morning and savored the wonderful "spot characterization," as well. I mean, Banks painted Jimmy and his family's whole world with the brushstroke of this one sentence!:
He was a man whose desire to stay from his large and squabbling family was both justified and satisfied by his need to support them, a neat circle that left him guilt-free and alone and his wife and children fed and happy, for they did not want him around much anyhow, since it was clear that when he was home, he was only trying to figure out how to get away again.
It's the stuff like this that makes me think Banks is a) a genius and b) writing not so much about Wade as about the experience of the modern rural American. Which makes me think Wade is not so much an everyman as a distorted, amplified representation of the modern American male; it's his childhood that I can't quite force into that role, though. Hmmm...
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I think you're spot on with the word "distorted". There's an implied nature vs. nurture argument going on in the book, as in Rolfe's ongoing question (and, I suspect, Rolfe's reason for writing this): "Why me and not Wade? Why Wade and not me?"
Wade's childhood is an obvious factor in his personality, but maybe more of a catalyst than a cause. "Affliction" can be something that's done to you, something you do to someone else, or something that's just in you like cancer. I think we see in Wade examples of all three: his childhood is an affliction, the havoc he perpetuates as an adult is an affliction, his alcoholism and temper, his toothache, are afflictions.
He causes subtler damage than his father, but that's mostly what he's done throughout the book, walk around damaging people in a misguided attempt to stick up for himself. And it's because he's a pushover with abusers, he seems built to take abuse; his pain and humiliation get deflected in other directions that let him feel even a few moments of power. He's so unused to having power that he never quite knows how to take proper advantage... the school bus incident, for instance, or our being told that he apparently hit Lillian on more than one occasion. We also see him in action with LaRiviere once he's figured out that the guy is suddenly prepared to give him the moon... he's so ill-equipped to extort, the best he can come up with is light back talk and asking if he can use the plow instead of the grader. He's so bad at making demands, LaRiviere makes them for him, offering him WAY more than he ever would have asked for.
Other than "afflicted", the first word I tend to think of in regards to Wade is "impotent". Very interested to see where he is by the novel's closing chapters.
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I couldn't have stopped reading the last couple of chapters if my house was on fire.
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The ending somehow managed to live up to (and even surpass!) all the tension that was built over the first 300 pages. Banks is a true master of his craft, pretty much every time I read him. Why he's not a household name, I don't get.
The major theme for our next discussion needs to center, once again, around naturalism and determinism. Fate is a big, BIG component of this text. I think seeing Wade's slow, unwilling transformation into his father is Rolfe's primary reason for telling this story.
Can't wait 'til Sunday! :)
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No kidding! I added him to my 'favorite authors' list. My mom took my copy when I finished it, so I'll be textless when we do the show Sunday. I'm going to try and keep a lot of stuff in my head to mention when we record.
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Doubtless your powers of concentration far surpass my own, but my advice would be: write them down.
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Don't try to change me, man. ;)
I am the killer dressed in pilgrim's clothing.
I'm the hard to find stations on the AM band.
I am the white sky high over Tripoli
I am the landmine hidden in the sand.
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I'm the hard to find stations on the AM band.
I am the white sky high over Tripoli
I am the landmine hidden in the sand."
See, with crazy stuff like that going through your head, you'll never remember what you want to say. ;)
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http://bookhouseboyspodcast.podomatic...
Sorry I've been absent on this one. Busy couple weeks is my reason-slash-excuse. I powered through the novel over the past week, then caught up on message board and podcast discussion.One quick note, one not-so-quick observation:
You say Rolfe is an unreliable narrator, and I am completely with you. In particular, his description of Wade's sexual encounters with Lillian, Margie, and Hettie is disturbingly detailed. And this passage stood out to me (pp. 309-310 on the Nolte/Coburn photo-cover edition):
[I]t was as if he thought he was Jack -- he was acting the way Jack did sometimes when he was drunk, especially lately: morose, inward, cryptic. These were not Hettie Rodgers's words, of course, but they are her perceptions, essentially...
All I can say is: Really, Rolfe? Really?
The one adjective I'd use to describe Wade through the first two parts of the novel is naive.
But for the book's third half (Car Talk shout-out), my two adjectives for Wade are self-destructive and above all, suicidal. And not just the last few days in Lawford, but for years before.
Remember, Wade is depicted as a violent man, but a cowardly one. Bluntly, he doesn't have the guts to off himself, so he looks for other ways to end his misery.
*Again and again in this final section, Wade (via Rolfe) goes back to Elbourne and Charlie fighting and dying in Vietnam, while Wade is relegated to checking ID's and breaking up bar fights as an MP in Korea. This appears to be one of the great regrets in Wade's life. Look at him at this point: His first split from Lillian has just happened; his family is a nightmare; he has a meaningless, mindless, futureless job. I submit that Wade wanted to fight in 'Nam, either so he could return home a war hero or -- my theory -- to die like a man.
*Wade chases Jack onto a not-quite-frozen beaver pond. Both men are driving heavy pickup trucks; Wade corners Jack on the pond so he cannot escape. Both men stand on the ice until Jack pulls a rifle on Wade to extricate himself. Wade is depicted as slowly -- I'd say reluctantly -- obeying Jack's gunpoint instructions before watching Gordon's truck swallowed by the ice.
(view spoiler)
Doesn't anyone else see Wade as a self-immolating timebomb, not just as some damaged but innocent dreamer?
Reading the book did remind me of the movie, which I haven't seen in over ten years, but lives in me the way this book will. Nolte and Coburn just owned the roles of Wade and Glenn Whitehouse. Your speculation that Willem Dafoe played Rolfe is correct, but my memory is that he barely appears in the film. I don't even remember if he narrates the movie, which I remember being told from Wade's POV. From the movie, I knew (view spoiler)but the tension was barely leavened by this knowledge.
Anyway, I've rambled enough (8700 characters left!). Fantastic book, five stars easy.
Again, apologies for being late to the party.
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Thanks for reminding me about what Rolfe says about Hettie's "perceptions." It was in my notes but I forgot to bring it up. Rolfe seems to possess one common trait of the Whitehouse family in spades: self-deception. Maybe it's his attempt to distance himself from Wade by accentuating the differences, as he sees them, in their respective personalities? Not sure. I suspected that the movie version might dump Rolfe's narration altogether; I'm sure the movie is great in its own right, but that narrator/protagonist relationship is so integral to how I experienced the book that I feel like it makes the movie not so much an adaptation, but a whole other animal.
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Yay! Jim droppin' science like Galileo dropped the orange! Your comments were awesome, Jim. I missed the above spoiler tagged one when I first skimmed your post. I think it's the best one. It definitely supports your theory of Wade's "Thanatos" as a character.
I'm glad you brought up 'Nam. I meant to bring it up on the show myself. I wanted to point out that Elbourne & Charlie's deaths were completely counter to their confrontations with Glenn. They came out (in the brief scene where they talk to Wade about Pop) seemingly unscathed and free of Glenn's domination, but were cut down by another enemy while serving their country, whereas Wade's service was much like his confrontation with his father: "cowardly" and ineffectual (not my opinion of our servicemen not on the front lines, by the way, but how I perceived Wade's...and maybe Lawford's to be) a pale shadow of what his brothers did before he got a chance to fight the good fight. I guess that might also lead into your death-wish view: Wade was damaged goods and a loser twice over before he returned to Lawford.
Damn, I miss this book.
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I wholly admit that I didn't think of Wade's actions the way you did, but now that you lay it all out like that, it seems almost obvious.
One thought I had on Wade's "failed" tour in 'Nam... it seemed very reflective of his own childhood. Charlie and Elbourne serve on the front lines in 'Nam, but Wade doesn't even make it in country... he gets shipped out to Korea. As in, the country that hosted the previous war. Just like with their father, Charlie and Elbourne confront the danger head on, but Wade is left to sort of clean up old conflicts. Being an MP in Korea in the late '60s must have been like being the town cop in Lawford... you're mostly directing traffic and cleaning up after bored drunks.
We also didn't talk about the prostitute Wade "fell in love with" in Korea. Typical Wade, he can't just do something illegal or immoral, he's got to find ways to justify it to himself and make it big and romantic. He returns to this woman over and over until, IIRC, he feels betrayed by her at some point. Then, paraphrasing here, but Rolfe says something like, he "barely thinks of her now, can barely remember her name". Then he (Rolfe) states her name exactly.
Man... we probably could've done 6 podcasts on this one. Just about everything Wade and Rolfe do or say throughout the entire book could be interpreted on multiple levels. We haven't really repeated authors on this podcast yet, but we might have to do another Banks book some time; this one was too much fun to discuss! :)
Thanks for the kind words, guys.Dave and Matt, I love your views of Wade and his brothers' military service as a mirror image of their home life. Makes a lot of sense to me.
Dave and Jason revisit the most intriguing facet of the novel: Rolfe as narrator. So much of this book hinges on how much -- if at all -- Rolfe's POV is believable. We could go on for pages about just this one fact. For Banks to structure his story this way was truly a masterstroke.
Obviously I did pick and choose my "evidence" of Wade as suicidal. He does seem to live in the present and try to plan for the future, but so much of his worldview is rooted in denial, or as Jason more accurately says, self-deception. To believe that he, Pop, Margie and Jill could live happily ever after is cosmic-level wishful thinking.
And Dave, consider this your cyber-nut kick for your spoilage of The Wire.
[/BAM!]
;)
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Maaaaatttttt!!!
You were supposed to edit that outtttt!
:^{
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Maaaaatttttt!!!
You were supposed to edit that outtttt!
:^{"
Seriously?! I don't edit for content, dude. I got enough work to do stitching together the stop-n-start Skype B.S. Why don't you edit yr mouth with yr brain?
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Edit yr face with my fist... grumble grumble.... ;)
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Ah, I see the problem. You're thinking my job here is to make you look/sound good. That's Dave's job, man. OH, SNAP! ;)
I wonder if we should publish on episode on our off-weeks that's just a 'watcha reading?,' 'question of the month' (with members' responses), etc., thing that is only as long as it takes for Skype to cut us off. Hmm...
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So it would be basically be the horse hockey I trim out of the first 20 minutes of the show! :)
It would also be our first accessible podcast. :S
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We should change the name of the show to "Super-Matt and the Esoterics".
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"Margie knew that soon one and then both of her parents would die, and she wondered what she would feel then. Abandoned? Relieved? Angry? All three, probably. Maybe that was how Wade felt today, and maybe that was why he seemed to be feeling none of them. You must feel frightened too, she reasoned, terrified--because when your parent dies, you know that, even if you squeeze out a normal three score and ten, you are next. That seemed to be what Wade was feeling most, now that she thought about it--frightened. It must get in the way of grief, that mix of abandonment, relief and anger, which no doubt came later, when you got used to the idea of being the next one to die."
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Second of all: Have I ever mentioned how much I love Banks? LOVE him.
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Watched.Definitely worth a viewing, but I found the flow of the story-telling to be a bit uneven at times.
BTW, James Coburn plays a mean mofo rather well.
The Bookhouse Boys
Books mentioned in this topic
Still Life with Woodpecker (other topics)Affliction (other topics)
Ragtime (other topics)
Affliction (other topics)
8/9: Chs. 1-9
8/16: Chs. 10-17
8/23: Chs. 18-end
Will this be the first book since Ragtime that all the boys can agree upon? Even we don't know! Join us for the discussion, won't you?