Litocracy

Sound track for this post: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones (What else?)

The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion (2013), is a romantic comedy in the vein of As Good as It Gets and Silver Linings Playbook. A little quirkier, a little more human than other offerings in the genre, but ultimately delivering the feel-good romantic triumph that makes RomCom such a joy.

The enormously successful novel stars Don Tillman, a talented but socially-inept genetics professor with a rigidly logical approach to life. Unselfconsciously literal and immune to social cues, Don displays many signs of Asperger’s Syndrome. He schedules each hour the day, eats the same seven meals each week, and tackles each new task with focused precision and rigorous application of the scientific method.

At 39, Don feels ready to marry but, as he explains in the first pages of the book, he has abandoned “the traditional dating paradigm…on the basis that the probability of success did not justify the effort and negative experiences” (p. 3). Instead, Don applies his trademark rationality, and develops a questionnaire designed to identify the perfect partner.

Don’s close friends Gene, a philandering psychology professor, and his wife Claudia, a clinical psychologist, try to assist with Don’s “Wife Project,” but without much success. Until Rosie appears in Don’s office. When she explains that Gene referred her, Don mistakenly assumes that Rosie is candidate for the Wife Project and invites her to dinner. Sparkling screwball hi-jinx ensue.

After their first memorable evening together, Don finds Rosie illogically appealing. She meets none of his requirements for a spouse, but, irrationally, he wants to see her again. So, he invents a reason. Don volunteers to use his genetics expertise to help Rosie identify her biological father. As the pair interview possible candidates and surreptitiously collect DNA, their relationship evolves. But can Don really win Rosie over?

It’s impossible not to like and root for Don. His inability to fully interpret social interactions makes his narration delightfully engaging, allowing readers a level of understanding Don himself lacks. His many missteps are entertaining, but his underlying sweetness and charm shine through. Don doesn’t have normal empathy. He does not cry at movies, or intuit other people’s emotions. What he does have is an earnest desire to make the people he cares about happy, and a willingness to do whatever it takes.

Its easy to imagine The Rosie Project as a Howard Hawks film (think Bringing Up Baby). The book has a distinctly cinematic feel. That’s no accident. As the author explains in his “Acknowledgements” The Rosie Project began as a screen play.

Sound track for this post: Rebel Girl, Bikini Kill

In her debut novel The Girls (2016), Emma Cline fictionalizes the events leading up to the Manson murders, recasting the story in Northern California.

In the summer of 1969, fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd meets sexy, bohemian Suzanne, who inducts her into the counterculture lifestyle of “the ranch.” There, Evie joins a group of young women, all worshipfully devoted to their leader, Russell. Greedy for Suzanne’s attention and eager to belong, Evie rebels against her upper-middle class upbringing. She shoplifts and steels from her mother, breaks into a friend’s home, has sex, runs away from both her parents. As the summer draws to a close, the utopian ranch community–such as it is–begins to fall apart, culminating in the most famous and grisly murders of the 20th century.

Though the plot is simple and well-trod, Cline’s style sets The Girls apart. Her writing is so beautifully exact, so astutely observed. Everyday objects are realized with the perfect turn of phrase–Chinese ribs have a “glandular sheen” (p. 76), cork sandals are “grimed with the ghost of my feet” (p. 166). Line by line, every passage is exactly right–evocative and convincing.

Cline’s characterization of Evie is similarly acute. Evie’s gender lies at the heart of her identity in an upsetting way that left me feeling both close to her, and embarrassed by the terrible familiarity of her anxieties. Cline illuminates the inner life of a teenage girl in a brutal, relentless way. Her depiction makes Evie’s indoctrination feel natural, like something that could happen to any young girl. The simmering unease of adolescence gives the novel tension, rather than the looming horror of the approaching murder.

Of course, I am predisposed to love The Girls. I was also a girl growing up in Northern California, and I sympathize with the author’s choice of subject. As a teenager my friends and I shared her fascination. Someone had a paperback copy of Vincent Bugiolosi’s Helter Skelter, which we read as a kind of group social activity. I remember my best friend describing Manson’s antics before the parole board, so this was probably around the time of his 1997 hearing–the one where he said he’d go “poof” if released. We would have been Evie’s age, thirteen or fourteen.

Returning to Helter Skelter as an adult, I was surprised by the book’s focus on trial evidence and testimony. As girls we skipped over all that to focus on what we saw as the interesting stuff–the ranch, the Beatles obsession, the messages on the walls of the LaBianca home, and the girls. I remember the folio of black and white photos at the heart of the book best. I can picture us, in someone’s living room during the nomad hours between school letting out and parents getting home, pouring over those pages.

At that age, the details of exactly what happened and why became tangled in my mind. I conflated facts with peripherally related cultural touchstones. Rosemary’s Baby (which I hadn’t seen) and devil worship; playing The Beatles backwards; Nazis and mind control and charismatic personalities; Trent Reznor’s haunted house. The whole story had an aura of black magic about it, eerie and unknowable.

And yet–there was a similarly infamous murder house in my own hometown–though not as famous as Cielo Drive. Horrific things could happen, close enough to touch you. Reading Emma Cline’s novel reminded me of that revelation, and the precariousness of girlhood.

Soundtrack for this post: 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush

I was invited to review Snow and Shadow (gasp!). That means some poor assistant charged with scouring niche book blogs copy-pasted my url into a spreadsheet. This type of outreach was one of my responsibilities at my very first (paying) publishing job, so I was irrationally thrilled when in 2014, I received a digital copy for review. That’s right THREE YEARS AGO. Let me say it now: I’m so sorry.

I started reading immediately and finally finished over the weekend (again, SO sorry). The marketing campaign is of course long over, but archaeological evidence still remains: several blog reviews, posted as part of what must have been a major blitz, respectable coverage in more established outlets, an excerpt in the Guardian, another in The Margins (accompanied by a fairly literal piece of art), even a skeleton book site. (I was particularly charmed by this interview in which Tse, while gracious, essentially tells the interview, repeatedly, that they are mistaken, and/or asking the wrong sorts of questions.) Clearly, this was THE book at a boutique small press. I wish I still had access to Bookscan, because I’d love to see the numbers.

Snow and Shadow is not a direct equivalent to any Tse short story collection previously published in Chinese, but rather a greatest hits designed to introduce English-speaking readers to her work. The collection is an assemblage of dreamy, anti-moral parables set in the shifting topography of a surreal Hong Kong. Tse’s style is direct yet obscure, characterized by a loose physicality, impersonal, often iconic, characters, overtones of classic fairy tales turned in on themselves, and, as translator Nicky Harman notes, “a total absence of sentimentality.” Together, these elements create a sense of unreality that enables extreme violence with a minimum of true horror.

In the first selection, “Woman Fish,” a lying wife transforms into a sort of grotesque mermaid, her head and torso morphing into those of a fish while her legs remain human. The piece reminded me of  Aimee Bender’s “The Rememberer” in which a woman watches her lover devolve into a turtle. In “The Love Between Leaf and Knife” a suffering couple engage in an inverted “Gift of the Magi” scenario in which each competes to sacrifice more. In another selection a boy wakes without a head. “Monthly Matters” features these amazing, jarring, violent one-line descriptions of pregnancy, popping balloons, stabbing of pregnant women, discarded fetuses, a girl cut, like Riding Hood, from the belly of a wolf. In the final, title selection, Tse re-imagines Snow White as a brutal hall-of-mirrors story of doppelganger princesses and obsessive emperors, in a snowy country where dwarves and animals with surgically enhanced human features patrol the forests.

I found myself drawn to my favorite tale, “The Mute Door,” initially by the lyricism of the language in the introductory passages. In it, an anonymous pizza delivery boy known only as “the stranger” wanders the constantly shifting halls of a maze-like building, searching for an apartment that may or may not exist. Its an ominous, alienating piece, one of the most concrete, and, for me, “easiest” offerings in the collection.

Reading Tse isn’t, generally, all that easy. The experience reminded me how little I know of Chinese literature. I’ve read the stories of Lu Xun, and Pu Songling’s Strange Tales–but that’s more or less it. This collection eluded me on some level, not only because it is deliberately fantastic, but because I’m only catching about 30% of the references. I know just enough to know that I’m missing something substantial. Serious critics could (and in Chinese I’m sure they probably do) spend scores of pages unpacking each of Tse’s tales, but the criticism that has appeared in English, at least online, is of the thinner “review” type, like the above. These works seem to deserve a deeper, more formal, more contextualized inspection than I can offer.

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