The Shack, by William P. Young

So I looked up The Shack on Wikipedia to see how many copies have been sold and saw a helpful link at the top reminding me that this was not the page for the rebranding of RadioShack. Is RadioShack seriously trying to call itself The Shack these days? Like it’s a cool place for people to go hang out? That’s almost as funny as chapter 11 in The Shack—a bestselling Christian novel whose tag line is “Where tragedy meets eternity”—which is titled, I’m not kidding, “Here Come da Judge.”

Now okay, the actual thoughts in The Shack are far more palatable than those in most Christian books. The authors’ intent was to open up people’s ideas of God and faith past those put forth by contemporary evangelical Christianity, and return to the image of God put forth in the New Testament: a huge, unknowable, cryptic, obliquely but explicitly loving figure who doesn’t care so much about rules. Coming from my Texas mega-church background, I think that’s great; I’m generally pretty bothered by the socialized aspects of Christianity and I was personally satisfied to read the parts where Jesus says things like “I don’t create institutions” and “A lot of what is done in my name has nothing to do with me, and is often, even if unintentional, very contrary to my purposes” and particularly where he says “Those who love me have come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims… I have no desire to make them Christian.” Of course, these are the parts of the book that have apparently made The Shack controversial, but I think these ideas are extremely reasonable.

However, slightly less than reasonable: pretty much everything else about the book. One of the collaborators, defending the controversy, said in an interview, “Art is incredibly subjective as to whether a story and style are appealing.” I actually giggled reading that because… art? The story of this book is that a broken man inundated with what he calls The Great Sadness (which is always capitalized and italicized) receives a note in his mailbox from “Papa” (God) instructing him to go to the shack where his daughter was murdered, which magically turns into a Narnia land of flowers and mountains where God awaits in the form of a big black lady named Elouisa, Jesus in the form of an ugly Middle-Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit as a crazy hippie Nepalese woman named Sarayu. The narrator is the sort of dad-jeans wearing guy who says things like “That’s just too cute” and prays with people he meets on camping trips, and there are many sentences such as “This was not that!” and “Looking at her through blurring tears, he could see that her smile was radiant.”

Art, this is not. I also think the sort of affirmative action at work in this book is more than a little tacky—we are frequently reminded that all the God figures, including God’s Wisdom personified in a Hispanic woman named Sophia, are so shockingly and crazily not white. I mean, it’s pretty undeniable that the historical Jesus would have been ripped apart by TSA airport scans, and are people honestly stupid enough to still think of God as a huge white dude who fixes your shit, like an out-of-costume Santa Claus? But I guess the reason why The Shack has sold about a billion copies and “changed people’s lives” is that people probably do still think like that. Well, we’ll all be smacked with reason eventually. Here Come da Judge.

You Cannot Hate Twilight Like I Hate Twilight

I was planning to write about Twilight at some point. First of all, it’s stupid as shit. Second, it’s about time; people have been going nuts over it for a couple of years, and the fuss is even dying down (thank God). But the reason I haven’t reviewed the book is–a reason that is probably already obvious–is that I hate Twilight so much that I can’t think about it without getting into Evil Grandpa levels of cranky. I know plenty of people I like have a fondness for Twilight but it’s just: why this of all things? Why a vampire romance? Why why why?

But I’m running low on ideas for books that most people have read (send me some!) so today I thought I would just take the plunge. I searched “twilight” on my computer because I knew I had gotten high and written a rant about Twilight at some point fourth year. Instead, I found this gem, which I had completely forgotten about and don’t remember writing. The reason for this is as follows: I turned in my thesis on March 31st and after that, I had not a thing due until May 3rd, when I had a ten-page criticism paper due. And so, in accordance with the way that I spent the whole intervening month, it turns out I did get high and write a rant about Twilight. Rereading it I was half angry that this is what I ended up doing in college, and half totally jealous of myself for taking classes that permitted me to get on my high horse like this.

The paper is called “Edward Cullen and To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the Cinematic Gaze in Twilight.” A) Ridiculous and B) I remember telling my dear friend Walt about it, and he said, “That sounds interesting but what is the reversal of the gays?” Generally it is a thick, silly essay, dripping with formal indignation and feminist rage and the writing of a person who has been drunk and wearing a bathing suit for two weeks. I feel like I have about ten friends who would think it’s funny so I’m posting it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Twilight after all, it’s just so irritating to me. Here are my views in a nutshell: Bella is boring and sucks. Girls only like her because Edward likes her and they want to be her, which is a harmful way to think, because Edward sucks too. Twilight, like a Taylor Swift song but to a much larger degree, seems innocuous and perfectly contemporary but is really passive/objectifying/repressive and most importantly, lame. It’s the same hundred words recycled over and over again (Bella said Edward stared glitter vampire brooding attraction flying werewolf gaze rain silent powerful etc), which again, is just like Taylor Swift (fifteen boy date car eyes window dream love princess etc). And I heard that in the last book Bella has some sort of alien baby that tries to eat her. Yeah, America. This one’s on you.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

One of my roommates and I were in this (wonderful) class and received The Blind Assassin, also by Margaret Atwood, as our weekly reading assignment. Several (smart, cool) ladies in the class started to wax enthusiastic about Queen Margaret, specifically speaking the praises of The Handmaid’s Tale, which is famous, honored, widely read and widely adapted. Walking away from class later, my roommate and I awkwardly finished each others’ sentences. She: “So, this book should be–” Me: “–good, but I don’t know, that whole sci-fi–” She: “–feminist, dystopian, ovaries, government thing–” Me: “–yeah, gross, Margaret Atwood’s not really–” She: “–what I want to read this weekend.”

But in retrospect, we were probably just being assholes feeling like it was our cool-duty as post-post-whatever-feminists to deny the absolutely revolutionary nature of this book. For example, I was at the bar yesterday enjoying the beautiful slice of Texas sunshine and this guy said something that reminded me to take my birth control. I took it, and he looked at my boyfriend and goes, “You’re welcome, sir.” I was like, “I’m welcome too!” and he said, “Blah blah our bodies ourselves, no lady shit at the table.” While I thought that was funny, I also thought it was telling of the fact that birth control sometimes seems to have been reduced to a girls’ chore; although we’re long past the Mad Men days, it’s akin to dusting in a French maid’s outfit, it signifies both promiscuity and a weird servility, it’s like a mild daily apology for the combination of liking sex and being pregnable. But then later that night, my boyfriend suggested that birth control rivals the Internet as far as Awesome Inventions go. And I agree so heartily that it should cancel out my previous kvetching. Because…

In The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a future dystopian America where disease and ecological meltdown has led a theocratic, military-enforced white male political party to completely take over the government, women are forced to be one thing to one person. They are either Wives, who are wives, Marthas, who are maids, or Handmaids, who bear children for the wives’ husbands, are named after the man to whom they are assigned, and are not allowed to read. The Handmaids, although forced into their duties, are seen as sluts by the Wives and Marthas. This all sounds ridiculous, but it’s written in the most understated, artful and whip-smart way possible. For example, Atwood doesn’t dodge any of the nuts-and-bolts details; as the magnitude of the situation unfolds, we find out that the women lost their power in scarily reasonable steps, their bank accounts being first transferred to their husbands’ then erased, their rights being suspended under what first was an emergency security situation and then bleak permanent reality. This is a great, important book and from now on I’ll freely admit my embrace of Margaret Atwood’s whole feminist sci-fi thing.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

I usually only put up a picture of the book cover that I own, but I took a real liking to this guy; the pill looks super tasty and is also red-white-and-blue, a nice unsubtle reminder of how Brave New World does a real turkey slap on some crucial aspects of American culture. Plus there’s a foreword by Christopher Hitchens in this one? There’s also an edition with a Margaret Atwood foreword. What am I doing watching Bobby Bottleservice Talks to the Sexy Internet Ladies when there’s stuff like this to be read? (The real answer is, it’s two months exactly until I leave, so, no further explanation.)

Let’s talk about the parallels. In Brave New World, society is divided into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, in which the highest caste operates at total self-actualized, tall, Aryan capacity while the lowest caste has stunted growth from bad chemicals and spends all day operating machinery while wiping sweat from their dark-skinned brows. That sounds… realistic. Especially in context of that South Carolina chach (wait, which one?) who compared poor people to stray animals–actually, Andre Bauer sounds more ridiculous than Aldous Huxley does on this one, so let’s just leave it. Here’s another. One of BNW society’s mantras is “Ending is better than mending.” Yikes. Besides the obvious fact that we all like to throw everything away and circle-jerk around our new smartphones, the applicability of this statement to relationships–I can’t even think about that right now.

The Feelies–Avatar. Soma–I’d say that the standard university combination of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, Vicodin, Monster, Ambien, sex, and Dan Deacon videos on YouTube feels a lot more like “soma” than Huxley would have ever imagined anything could. In terms of after-hours merrymaking becoming so on-demand, every-nerve-ending-perfectly-stimulated, this idea of soma being chemically transcendent enough to replace the need for religion seems pretty biting. And, what else. This is again taken from Wikipedia: “In geographic areas nonconducive to easy living and consumption, the World State allows well controlled, securely contained groups of ‘savages’ to live.” Hmm, that’s awkward.

But I must admit. I’m running my mouth about society as usual, but if this life is bringing me things like Bobby Bottleservice I honestly have no complaints at all.

Wayside School is Falling Down, by Louis Sachar

Wayside School. The Brechtian funhouse that haunts my dreams, featuring the ever-patient groundskeeper Louis, the daft, loving Mrs. Jewls, cows on the roof, millions of dollars in paper bags, hoboes, mistaken identities, nascent sexual fascination with pigtails, and so much more. There are three books in the Sideways Stories from Wayside School series; this one is my favorite, but all three are magnificent, frank, blandly terrifying constructions of 30 loosely linked stories, in which the 19th chapter is about the 19th floor that doesn’t exist, and the 17th chapter runs backwards, and so on and so on.

There’s some fearful, opaque symmetry about the Wayside stories, and this strangely consistent illogic: I would bet that the kids who really liked these books grew up to be either LOST fans or, I don’t know, illiterate savants, like Charlie on It’s Always Sunny. Seriously, these books are legitimate theater. Everything happens under a kind of inevitable, non sequitur rule. Like, in one story in Wayside School is Falling Down, the kids are playing a prank on a substitute teacher named Mrs. Franklin by pretending that they’re all named Benjamin, and Mrs. Franklin complacently calls everyone Benjamin until the end of the story, when she says that they’re such good friends that they can call her by her first name: Benjamin. There’s another running story where this kid whose name is actually Benjamin (Nushmutt) ends up going by Mark Miller the entire year because Mrs. Jewls made a mistake the first day, and the one time he gets the courage to correct everyone, it’s during a music lesson. Mrs. Jewls keeps asking him to speak up louder, but all the kids hear is “Louder!” and they bang even harder on their tambourines and xylophones and no one ever hears his real name.

Here’s another example, cribbed directly from Wikipedia. Chapter 7, Freedom: Myron observes a bird outside the window, and thinks about how his desk is like a cage, and how the bird must see him in his desk and think that he is caged, and the bird is free. So one day, he walks down into the basement where he is discovered by bald men with attaché cases, asking him whether he would like freedom or safety. He chooses freedom, but ends up going back to class. During all this, he loses one of his shoes, which is then found by Mrs. Jewls in the Teachers Lounge refrigerator.

Seriously? That is crazy.

Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is the most honest writer I have ever read. Reading her work is an incredibly affecting experience: it’s like standing in a giant empty airplane hangar, listening to a disembodied William Shatner narrate the plot of an episode of Looney Tunes, and then getting punched violently in the stomach. I’m totally serious. But I won’t fuss it up anymore. This is her story “Insomnia” in its entirety:

My body aches so—It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.

“Index Entry,” also in its entirety: Christian, I’m not a.

From “Grammar Questions”: Now, during his time of dying, can I say, ‘This is where he lives’?

This is from “Break it Down”:

“The ticket was $600,” he says to himself, “and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that would be anywhere from $33 to $50 an hour, which is expensive.” On the other hand, he goes on, he enjoyed his lover’s company every waking hour—roughly 16 hours a day, and “sixteen into a hundred would be $6 an hour, which isn’t too much.”

Lydia Davis is just formally brilliant, and so smart about the things that are the hardest to put into words, in the tradition of Brecht and Beckett more than anything else. I read in an interview in the Believer that she writes like this because she wants to write against the artifice that is inherent in the usual way of describing a scene, which is something a lot more writers would do if only they knew how. Because how do you write about insomnia? You can describe, ploddingly, how you flip the pillow over; you can give yourself a miserably average inner monologue about considering getting a snack, going to the bathroom; you can rue the latte you got after work just because it was red-cup day. Or you can be honest about it, and know that all you remember about insomnia is that sore, despairing, lonely feeling of incoherence. My body aches so—It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.

And I think a huge part of the power of Davis’s honesty is its odd link to gender. It’s not feminine except for in the cloudiest, most generative Freudian sense–but it is so feminine. She is so incredibly interior, to the point that her narration is necessarily devoid of phallic thought. Does that make sense? And yet (I have to say it) her work penetrates deeper than its masculine equivalent could–by making the ego strangely absent, she gets at the self completely. And, and, her collected works just came out.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I think The Road is the book that has affected me more strongly than any other. It is insane: it could truly make a person insane if you inhabited the place it comes from, and the language is so powerful that it almost forces you to. It’s about the most brutally bleak post-apocalypse scenario that could ever be envisioned, and within it, a father and son trying to stay alive from hour to hour, heading on a devastating and pointless journey to the sea (a fixation that seems vaguely potent to me, associated as it is with Coney Island and California dreams) where they hope they will meet people who aren’t trying to eat them. There’s no why: whatever catastrophe took place is essentially unexplained, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the ruin of the world is so complete that they often seem out of recognizable time and space altogether–one line calls it “some cold glaucoma dimming the whole world.”

In the book, Cormac McCarthy has broken pretty much all issues in life to their bare, terrible bones. Father and son, removed from all context of family or home, are like two dogs watching out for one another. Memories are everywhere but disgusting. Food is poisonous fuel, clothes are necessary dangers.

An example line: “Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years… He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

2666, by Roberto Bolano

2666 is indisputably the most brilliant thing I have ever read. (Also, math textbooks notwithstanding, the most difficult.)

I mean, it’s ridiculous. Like a symphony that goes on for three weeks and only gets better, played by an orchestra of the criminally insane. It is staggering to imagine that one person could compose this novel. The scope is massive. Nothing has ever taken me longer to read, and the two books that have come close (War and Peace and Gravity’s Rainbow) are what they are–similarly brilliant and difficult–but not as good as 2666. This book is forceful, terrifying, lopsided, uncontrollable, barely controlled. It’s about time and art as much as it is about the true story of thousands of unexplained murders in Ciudad Juarez. It has that roiling, rhythmic ambiguity that seems to be at the heart of truly amazing things. I know all of this sounds ridiculous, but it’s like this quote, which if you read carefully is totally nuts:

“…danger, the moment of revelation, unsolicited and afterward uncomprehended, the kind of revelation that flashes quickly past and leaves us with only the certainty of a void, a void that very quickly escapes even the word that contains it.” (p. 436)

So yeah. This book will seem intolerable if you’re just looking for entertainment. But if you can handle your shit (like James Franco, who recently asked my friend his assistant to purchase it for him: marry me James Franco)–then read it. And talk to me!

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

When I started reading this in 2003 I was really put off by how dense and crazy it was, so I stopped. But I think most of that was because I didn’t know who Margaret Atwood was and I didn’t know what to expect–I didn’t know that a sci-fi snowglobe full of genetic engineering and child pornography and videogames called Kwiktime Osama was kind of par for the course–and when I read the book again this year I was prepared for crazy shit.

The book is set in a dystopian near-future, in which certain things that exist in our present (genetic hybrids, porn for every fetish, the giant rich-poor gap) have spiralled out of control. There has been a disease apocalypse, and one man is left alone with a bunch of neutered, unquestioning human-ish creatures, for whom he is forced to invent a story about how the world came to be, and hope that they continue to believe that they are under divine orders to bring him fish. You don’t find out till the very end exactly how and why it all happened, and with each chapter she measures out little pieces of the puzzle–it’s great.

And, sentence by sentence, Margaret Atwood pulls the story through with only a slight feeling of effort: I think it’s How Fiction Works that cites this as an example of clarity of language: “On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender.” Gorgeous writing, grimly funny tone throughout. And in my opinion, “Last Man” stories are nearly always interesting, at least–even I Am Legend was not too shabby.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Apparently this is one of the most successful, honored “speculative fiction” (fantasy) books of the twentieth century. I am confused, then, as to why I didn’t like it at all. I’m into weird things, generally: I was totally down with Redwall, the C.S. Lewis space trilogy, Lord of the Rings, etc. I even used to read those terrible pre-pre-pre-prequel Star Wars novelizations. So maybe it’s this “adult” speculative fiction that gets me. The basic thing of the book is that gods are everywhere, and there only because we want them to be there. There are Old Gods, New Gods, Norse gods, Indian gods, Johnny Appleseed, etc. Good so far: and then not good when the Queen of Sheba pretends to be a hooker and then uses her vagina to swallow people. Because of that, and because of some truly annoying writing such as “Zorya, my dear, may I say how unutterably beautiful you look? A radiant creature. You have not aged,” I was into this book only at the rare moments when Neil Gaiman’s balls-out ridiculousness works. Such as the passage that begins:

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe in things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen… I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state…”

Why not?