Archive for the 'Literature' Category

Nick Hornsby wrote one of my favorite books, which became one of my favorite movies, High Fidelity. How To Be Good is not his newest effort, but its the one I was drawn to picking up and reading at Barnes N Noble. There are two reasons it was this and not one of the other books of Hornby’s i actually want to read more that I read sparodically when I wasn’t checking out periodicals or books about science and spirit over tea in B & N. The less complimentary reason is that it was the least appealing and well reviewed of his books and the one I was less likely to actually buy. Others like, About A Boy, I know I’ll purchase and read at leisure in the comfort of my home and work place in shorter durations. The other reason, and the more important for the purpose of this review, was the title and its implications.

I read the first few pages standing up and was immediately concerned about the female protagonist who narrates the story. Katie starts off by notifying us that she’s a normal person who doesn’t usually do things like she’s doing at the beginning of the story. Namely this consists of calling her husband from a parking lot and asking for a divorce as he sits home taking care of their 2 kids and she’s out having an affair. It’s a one time thing she assures us, not the kind of thing she’s gone around doing her whole life. Then she adds that she sounds like Oswald saying that he didnt want to be judged by offing a President since its not the kind of thing he usually does. Well, sometimes, as she says, “You are judged by your one offs.” Here was a regular and by most of our standards, normal and good person, doing something bad and wanting some absolution. But is that possible in a world of complications and interactive dynamics between people?

We come to find out that her husband has been distant, has become a cynical fuck with a nasty sense of humor that informs his England towns newspaper column in which he rants from the angry man perspective. In fact the column is titled The Angriest Man In Holloway. He’s no fun anymore, the passion is gone, the kids can’t hold it together, and things in general aren’t what she hoped they would be. In other words she was going through what virtually all of us go through. Being slapped by the reality that all marriages face to some extent or another. She comes to realize how wrong and untenable her affair was, tries ending it as she sees what an insufferable whiny, lovelorn ass, her sex partner was, and to feel alot of guilt about not only all she has done, but the fact that her husband Dave suddenly has a miracle conversion.

The story pivots on this epiphany brought on by some new age healer Dave goes to for his long standing back problems, which his wife’s world of medicine can do nothing for. He is cured and instilled with some kind of spiritual energy that causes him to quit his job and invite the healer, named Good News, into his home to together help people and change the world. Dave truly grows and sees how distant and cynical he’d become. He gives away his and his kids possessions to needier people. he plans out an adopt a homeless kid program in his neighborhood. He becomes truly compassionate, kind, understanding, forgiving, and giving. He’s really becoming a good person. But he’s also becoming a bore and raising his family to an impossible standard. His wife is put in the position of feeling like she’s a bad person for not enjoying this new Dave even though shes getting the changes she wanted. He’s more loving and honest. He’s not nasty and cynical. But he can’t get along with old friends of theirs because their priorities and humor are not those of the new Dave’s and he’s mocking all her anxieties and unhappiness by exposing them to the colder and much harder realities of so many people like the homeless kids Dave sets up a neighborhood adoption program to house.

And none of this really brings the spark back either. Not permanently anyway. But she knows this is not going to happen with anyone and a part of her misses the cynical and at least occasionally witty guy she cheated on. And the sex is functional and efficient after all the years of familiarity, whcih has something going for it after the initial rush of her lovers bloom is washed away by his neediness and impracticality.

The thing that kept me picking up the book at B & N was the desire to find out if Dave’s newfound committment to altruism and an elevated spirit of selflessness which I and so many of us surely sometimes contemplate giving ourselves too to alleviate our sense of unfulfillment, can be sustained or whether or not his wife’s more prosaic outlook is more than cynical and all we can hope for. At least she’s a Dr and helping a few people, if not all her patients, and maybe thats more than most of us can hope for in our efforts to be something more than a byproduct of a bunch of selfish genes. Perhaps a compromise could be reached? And can the marriage survive any of these alternatives?

These are people about my age and as we get older everyone will go through these emotions. No marriage will be a fairy tale, we will all act selfishly, be bored by our partners, have negative thought about kids if we have them, resent the loss of youth and freedom, and so many other natural reactions. But I was looking for Hornby’s belief about the solutions to these problems. Did he feel as if the life of devotion, truly changing ones habits of thinking and acting like Dave, was sustainable and could bring joy? Did he think it foolish pie in the sky silliness that distances people from reality, including that of their family? Did he feel that an unhappy marriage should end? Or should it be fought for and more or less survived?

Ultimately I guess we get a sort of compromise. The resolution is not a happy or sad ending but more of a slice of life period in learning the lessons valuable to growth. The particulars of these characters situations are important. Who they are, where they are, how old they are, all of it matters. The slice of life we are left with is of a family that realizes that as far as they’ve come together and as much as they’ve experienced or need, the grass is not alwasy greener, there’s nothing much better out there than they have in here and as long as they have those precious years and emotional investments there is more here to hold on to then is realistically out there. Dave is not able to sustain the passion. The experience leaves him seemingly changed for the better but nowhere near the committed soldier of philanthropy he was trying to become. She is more open herself, the 2 both trying to be good people without upsetting the applecart at home too much since thats all they have in the end, and all they can really be expected to be responsible for.

Can’t say i was satisfied with this. But it probably is realistic. Maybe the book is meant to mirror life in that way. Expectations are built early, we think we’re heading for some big answers, revelations are due us that will point us in new directions, and we will be changed for the better. Instead we get gradual acceptance, compromises, re-evaluations of our expectations, and a quiet sense of settling in.

Part of me thinks this is a rationalization to justify our compromised negotiations with life. Instead life should be lived at a higher level and if you can’t give your partner and kids that best in the present circumstances, or to take the idea our of the context of the book and into our lives, if our jobs, relationships, conduct, motivation, living arrangements or whatever, aren’t working, we should change them. Get busy living or get busy dying.

But I can also see how that might not always be possible and sometimes there might be nobility and growth in learning to accept who you are, appreciate what you have, and break those chains of desire. As Buddha said, one of the prime reasons for unhappiness is desire and wanting what we dont have. Maybe I can only gain some sense of fulfilled destiny by seeing things through with my father, doing that duty, or dharma, as the Buddhists might say, and this is all their will be. No feeding the starving, devoting myself to a global cause, or finding a Holy Grail. Is that ok?

Now this debate comes down to 1 thing for me, at least at this moment. One question that must be asked and answered. It goes something like this: Does our desire, and it’s subsequent lack of fulfillment if its not met, come from an inherent nature and destiny that must be reached for? Or does it come from basic psychological needs to want what we see others having and the tendency to think the people that have those things are much happier than we are?

I lean towards believing the latter, but hold out hope for an aspect of the former. That aspect consists not of a destiny placed in our souls by some benevolent old man with the world at his fingertips, but rather in a shared sense of destiny in the sense of evolving ourselves and in doing so making our little contribution to the greater progress and evolution of the species. Now I’m obviously off on a tangent as far as the books theme goes but this is what I like to do with reviews on this site because its my site and I know most of you are not interested in reading this book anyway. So as all literature does, I want it to spark a conversation. Give the author his due for furthering the collective progress. In that vein I am moved to take the questions the book sparked in me and ask this question. What are we here for?

Not a new question of course. But getting a sense of its answer is tied into whether or not the characters in the book, and we, are better off settling into our lives and appreciating what we have, and perhaps changing what we can. Or if we are moved to find soemthing else is it due to some inherent spark, like our own inner black monoliths for the monkey inside of us to touch and wonder at as it plants the seeds in us of something greater we can have if only we desire and imagine it first?

But the more I think of this the more I am brought down to reality by the options we have, the impositions and obligations we contend with. That even if we have a real need for more, far more practical things decide our fates. Indeed the evidence is there that genetics and our environments determine so much of our lives. So much of what we are, what we want, even who we want, come from genetics and impressionalbe life events that mentally wire us to a disposition of joy, sorrow, or various other combanations of emotions. Our neurons and synapses are like railroad tracks laid down by events and thoughts that become trains grooved to run on the well laid pathways that make up our patterns of thought until they are runaway trains that can not find a new track without having to crash and rebuild first.

So ending a period in our lives that has roots in bad relationships, a bad job, bad addictions, or just a general sense of ennui and uselessness certainly requires work. Most probably it requires some damage being done first. But how to know the difference between when it’s worth holding on to because it doesn’t get any better, and when it’s time to move on and recreate yourself?

Ahhh, that is the question.

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the book Fight Club, on which the most excellent movie was based, has written another tale of modern ennui and self-negation that he warns the reader to stop reading in the first chapter if they’re looking to get saved or find any redeeming value in. The book is a dark tale dealing with addictions of a mainly sexual nature that is written with a humor and brevity that doesn’t dwell on the darkness as much as on some of its sillier symptoms and compulsions. It’s lead character Victor Mancini is a sexaholic who mainly goes to sexaholic meetings for sex and to get tips on how and where to get more sex. Here he tells us the mythological sex monsters we’ve heard about in stories like the woman, the peanut butter, and the dog at the dinner party, the cheerleader with a stomach full of semen, the guys who got mangled in the vacuum hoses with cutting blades for clogging, the zucchini guy, all the cautionary tales of sexual deviation, it is here that we find that they are all real. Victor knows them and he wants to fuck many of them as he gets better.

This will of course remind Fight Club fans of Jack’s attending various disease support groups in order to gain sympathy, a hug, and to feel something. It is this need for empty people so numbed by lack of meaning and modern culture that leads Jack to starting fight clubs. Pain becomes something to feel and connect him. Like Jack, Victor has that hole inside, instead choosing sex with as many women in as many sordid and novel ways to create a sense of connection.

But with Victor we get a bit more back story dealing with his mother that sheds light on his motivations and female issues. Vic’s mom, or a reasonable facsimile of one for a society poisoned with so much sickness, was in and out of jail and when out abducted Vic for some short term adventures that among other things taught him that art comes from pain and you have to risk your life to get love. That leads to Vic’s adult hobby of pretending to choke in restaurants to feel that love as he’s hugged back into life and reassured by strangers he tells himself he is saving by giving their lives meaning in this heroic act he gives to them as a gift. This goes back to an experience with his mother during one of her abductions where his choking gets him affection as it gets her arrested and thus probably contributing to his strange sexual proclivities.

That also is connected to the past where his first experience is revealed to have shaped him, and like with many people who are trying to recapture that first feeling no matter how bad, in many cases even abusive, he needs to escalate the novelty and minimilize the length of contact. He and his best pal Denny, who is a cronic masturbator, work at a colonial period theme park where they are literally stuck in 17th century America and have to dress the parts. And of course being stuck in the past is part of the problem for all these people stuck in their infantile sexual states. Past decides our future unless we make the effort to decide for ourselves what we want and it is Denny in tryiing to find a compulsion other than jerking off that starts to find a way to build something new by redirecting his pathology. Rocks and stones become his metaphor, standing as the something more solid we can focus our addictions on to build ourselves something more to help “the days of my life to add up to something.”

Victor has no such focus or desire to alter his behavior. Before having to quit medical school to support his mother and his addictions he became well acquainted with every bodily flaw that makes us so imperfect and susceptible to death. He seems like someone for whom life is death so they may as well get every fleeting moment of orgasmic satisfaction out of it. Like most addicts the addiction is what he must live for. The addiction is a viable option to the more frightening feelings of life like sadness, anger, fear, worry, or depression. But an obsession with a woman named Paige at the geriatric facility his mother is living and dying in changes him and leads to his attempt to find his father. The woman represents herself as a married Dr who is just trying to be one of Vic’s many conquests, trying gamely to get him to screw her in the hospital chapel while wearing nothing but her Dr’s lab coat. But Victor resists as part of his multi step recovery program for his addiction which takes a new turn when the Dr’s investigations into his mothers past reveals that she may not be so crazy when she said he was immaculately conceived. He in fact may be an offspring of Jesus as a matter of fact. This is due to a church conspiracy involving cells taken from Christ’s foreskin which actually has little to do with the novel and is not a featured part. I say this so no one will read this expecting to get any Davinci Code intrigue or even Tom Robbins Another Roadside Attraction.

This discovery does force a collision between his newfound, “enormous capacity for love,” and his excuse for his lifestyle, which goes something like this: “”There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit…We live and we die and anyting else is just delusional. It’s just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There’s just decisions and disease and death. What I am is a dirty, filthy, helpless sexaholic, and I can’t change, and I can’t stop, and that’s all I’ll ever be. And I’ll prove it.”

The Jesus symbolism eventually winds up in bromides about saving ourselves, and creating our own messiahs, as Denny builds his rock counting and collecting obsession into something, anything, just so long as they build something of their own making. Vic even manages to get himself slightly stoned in the biblical sense. But the idea is to break from his mother’s confession of having wasted so much of life tearing things apart rather than creating. We live in a world where so many of us don’t know what to do with ourelves, a world where, “we’ve taken the world apart and dont know what to do with the pieces” Addiction becomes a way of escaping what we know, our bite of the apple, the knowledge of how lousy things are, to find peace.

Of course the peace is always short lived in direct ratio with the strength of our addiction and its danger. It becomes something to live against since we have nothing to live for, to paraphrase the book. Making a mess of our lives seems like a subconscious way of making our lives better since just living without sinking to such levels of depravity and lack of control seems like so much more than it does for those who have always lived average lives of quiet desperation and haven’t surrendered themselves to addictions. At least not of a huge nature since most of us have our addictions and patterns of behavior that console and comfort us though they may not be in our healthiest long term best interest. So for an addict life can only get better by making it worse.

Ultimately choosing and creating apart from what society has chosen for us to be is part of the books message. Denny comes to understand that in creating, “more will be possible. The longer we can tolerate being incomplete. Delay gratification.” The hint of the creative instinct shines through as the inference of how it is natures misfits that create great things, Vic’s mothers assertion of art coming from pain being re-thought as breeding invention. Out of rocks and chaos the Pilgrims Denny and Victor dress up as for work, turned their own nasty psychosis and repressive sexual weirdness into a very different reality as we know it. And so too can we turn our own shortcomings into something more out of a desire to just create and build and choose our addictions rather than letting them choose us.