Giving Up (For Now?)

 

 

 

I once so obsessed over books that if I started one, I had to finish it. I’m not sure why,  but I can report that I got over whatever mania gripped me. 

 

 

 

Occasionally I give up on something because I’m just not in the mood for what’s on offer. Once or twice, I’ve revisited something I tossed aside and absolutely loved it. One such endeavor was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I ditched it in 2001 when it won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. It’s a wonderful book about the Golden Days of the comic book industry as well as a tale of Jewish life, the immigrant experience, and the American Dream. It’s surely one of the best novels of the 21^st century.

 

Am I equally off base with the three below? If any of you have read one or more of these, feel free to tell me why I’m nuts and why I should try again. 

 

 

 

The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Paul Murray follows Ireland’s Barnes family from one travail and lousy situation to the next. The very title suggests they were doomed to be dysfunctional. When Dickie and Imelda Barnes were wed, a bee flew up her veil and stung her so badly her face swelled up like a circus balloon. That’s why there are few wedding snaps.

 

I disliked Murray’s writing. He’s one of those who jumped on the who cares about punctuation bandwagon. That was en vogue when postmodernism was all the rage, but I was never a fan. Murray isn’t even consistent in his avoidance; sometimes he punctuates and sometimes he doesn’t. I can also do without James Joyce-like stream of consciousness prose.

 

The Bee Sting also appears to suffer from Angela’s Ashes Syndrome, my reference to Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir. There has been a definite trend among Irish novelists to see who can wear the Most Miserable Childhood crown. I grant that there is a deep streak of fatalism in Celtic cultures, but I think I’ve overdosed on them and I feared that Imelda’s bee was still active and buzzing around my head. One of the reasons I loved the film The Quiet Girl (2022) so much is that it left me with hope. 

 

 

 

Speaking of unrelenting despair, Kerry Howley takes a look at the contemporary life in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State. This non-fiction biography meets investigative reporting work tells us that privacy is dead, whistle blowers should beware, it’s not a good idea to carry off classified documents, and don’t speak to officials who claim they can help you. It follows Reality Winner, a disaffected Black intelligence officer.

 

That’s as far as I got before I gave up, though the New York Times called it an important book that’s often “darkly funny.” It’s hard for me to imagine what’s “funny” about a five-year jail sentence or that Big Brother really is watching. I know the Deep State is scary and that privacy is more myth than reality. Howley might be right when she insists that we are little more than “data about data.”

 

I tossed it aside because: (1) I don’t believe Edward Snowden or Julian Assange are free speech crusaders, (2) because some, like Daniel Ellsberg, are cut from very different cloth, and (3) I don’t know what to do with what Howley is telling us. We could chortle at the absurdity of our times–and there were some world-class stupid things going on in the book–but ultimately, the Deep State is no laughing matter. Or maybe it is. I didn’t make it to the punchline.  

 

 

 

Perhaps I have a thing about prize winners. In 2003, Edward P. Jones won a Pulitzer for The Known World. It’s about Henry Townshend, an ex-slave who becomes a landowner who lords over his own Black slaves. That’s a real thing, though The Known World is a novel.

 

I’m not sure why I couldn’t get through a book that many have proclaimed a masterpiece. Theories: (1) I’ve known about Black enslavers since my undergraduate days. (2) I’ve thought about how slavery negatively impacts everyone associated with the "peculiar institution” since I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin forever ago. (3) I have found other novels about the horrors of slavery more interesting.

 

Of the three books mentioned, The Known World is the one I’m most inclined to put back in the queue. What say all of you?

 

Rob Weir