Rachel Kushner: Better Than Good

Only a select few can write books one delays eating and sleeping for. Rachel Kushner is another familiar name I’m just catching up with and I’m pleased to close out 2022 with a book of hers I found quite difficult to pull myself away from, a collection of essays from across her publishing career, which form a sort of fragmented memoir, called The Hard Crowd (2021).  

She covers a lot of ground, within her best essays and from one to the next. And not as someone on assignment, formal and impersonal, but with the energy and freedom granted by going wherever curiosity or memory leads, combined with the intimacy of the I-voice. The first is about an exceptional experience: Kushner's life in San Francisco, CA as a motorcycle enthusiast and an illegal race she participates in that could have killed her but thankfully only tore her up. It’s far-reaching yet compressed personal history. It’s an adventure tale. It’s an insider’s account that gripped me even though I’m almost hostile to the subject (dangerous to more than just the motorcyclist, especially the way her friends rode). And it’s a tribute to the dead.  

The second essay is also about an exceptional, though very different, experience: life among the second-class citizens of Israel, the Palestinians, in the Shuafat Refugee Camp of East Jerusalem. Years have passed and Kushner is now a writer. She doesn’t know much about the intractable conflict, so she tours the area alongside a good man with a good name, Baha Nababta. Her presence is novel and the kids love Nababta, a community organizer who’s dedicated his life to improving the camp however he can. They begin to gather around and shadow the pair, turning the tour into a little parade. “Hello America!” one kid shouts. In a barbershop, another kid flexes his arm for Kushner. His muscle is described as a “baby potato.” Such heartwarming scenes are followed by devastating scenes that are routine for them, in a place neglected by the authorities unless they need to inflict pain, a place without access to health care or education, without safe roads or housing, turned lawless.  

One, two: Thrills at 130 mph and funereal pace. Danger by choice and danger (and misery) one is born into, with hardly a chance to escape. Both a tribute to the dead, in different registers. 

She had me. I’d bet that most anyone who reads those two pieces, “Girl on a Bike” and “We Are Orphans Here,” unless you’re a self-pitying ex-boyfriend with a cringeworthy pet phrase in the former case, or barred by hate and ignorance in the latter, will have to read the book until the end. And from there I began to ask myself if she could meet the standard set by the best essayists. For instance: Does she have the power to make anything she wants to talk about interesting?  

Not quite. Kushner has the style. She isn’t flashy, she isn’t remarkably playful or weird. She’s never less than limpid and dexterous, knows the value of a splash of color rather than a torrent. I can count on one hand how many verbal missteps I found in the entire book, all minor, no need to say another word about them. Every essay has sentences to savor, a beguiling rhythm to get into. But it isn’t enough to overcome the jargon and esoteric information in certain spots. I’ve found it’s one of the most difficult balancing acts: The expert, or someone writing about an obsession, doesn’t necessarily want to stop and explain for anyone who doesn't know what he or she does. It interrupts the flow and, over time, it could get tiresome for the writer, as though one is permanently stuck in an introductory mode. Avoid it, however, and the general reader may find it inaccessible, no matter how nice the presentation. Now the essay is only for other stamp collectors. When Kushner writes at length about cars, she brings me down, because I don’t particularly care about cars and the essay doesn’t give me enough of a reason to care. This is a series of sentences as they appear in “Flying Cars”: 

There’s a 1965 Mercury Marauder. I always like those. Even if the lines are a little square, the fastback makes up for it, but it’s a car that has to have sport rims or forget it.  

Why is 1965 the chicane through which all American car design went from curvy to boxy? 

Nineteen sixty-eight was another chicane, which led to puffy quarter panels, and even outright blimpage. 

Same as when she writes about Jeff Koons, which is her at her most dry, removed, and slightly pedantic. After reading it, I formed no opinion about his work whatsoever. (And I know I’m capable of taking an interest in the visual arts: Peter Schjeldahl, for example, can guide me into his obsessions and convince me to care and without necessarily writing as though for someone who’s never stepped foot in a gallery.) Read individually, this could be a problem. Kushner gets away with some expert-level pieces because, again, those sentences, and they’re tucked in the middle. In any case, as she explains in her closing essay, she doesn’t mind being bored by your story. From which I gather: she’s willing to risk boring you.  

In one memorable instance, Kushner demonstrates that she can write a good introductory piece if she so chooses. “Is Prison Necessary?” profiles Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an activist and professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in what would surely be a widely controversial subject if more people knew about it: prison abolition. I arrived with some prior reading experience and interest in the prison system. Kushner walks the reader through the subject, heated reactions, and responses to those (inevitable) reactions. What if the prison system, for all the cost, for all the suffering and environmental damage it causes, doesn’t make us any safer? The piece asks readers to consider an alternative. (And it points out that prison originally was the reform. Doesn’t mean society has exhausted its options and can’t keep evolving.) I wasn’t entirely swayed – Gilmore wrote an acclaimed book on her work that’s too complex to summarize – but it managed to make me usefully embarrassed at times. She challenges misconceptions about the number of low-level drug offenders that are locked up in the US and the exaggerated problem of for-profit prisons, and I realize some of my opinions on the matter have been received. I will cease to spread them and locate Gilmore’s book. 

I don’t have a copy handy but I believe it’s in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound that a stranger insists on helping Zuckerman with his health issues as thanks for his depiction of New Jersey. Now I understand the impulse when I think about Kushner’s essays on San Francisco. In “Not with the Band,” she recounts her experiences working as a bartender in the city’s most famous music venues. This writer on work and music: no risk of boring me. A couple of things about it. I must mention the best opening to a set I’ve heard of. It happens at the Fillmore. A great band requests to have Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby” play just before coming on. (I can practically hear my brother Miguel in the crowd say: “oh shiiit!”) If you don’t know this song, and you’re cool enough to enjoy sexy 70s grooves, play it. First the drummer comes onstage. He sits behind the kit and starts tapping his hi-hat to the song’s beat. “One by one the musicians came onstage and joined in. In a sharkskin suit and white shoes, Nick Cave took the microphone, and the transition from Barry White to the Bad Seeds was complete.” Can't be topped. Second: Kushner is invited to a bar that hosts PJ Harvey. Even though she’s just played a sold-out show at the Warfield, the musician takes the stage and proceeds to play for the whole night. “This impressed me. The message I took from it was: to be truly good at something is the very highest joy. And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all.” Afterward she leaves and begins her life in pursuit of a career in writing. End of essay. I was surprised, surprised at my surprise, and vaguely disappointed. Considering the passel of depressive great artists throughout history (not to mention “good” artists), “joy” in one’s skill or talent, if it is indeed a wonderful feeling, must be thought of only in a narrow and possibly ephemeral sense. But, fine, I don’t see the use of arguing with such a personal belief. That second part, though: Isn’t witnessing greatness a legitimate precondition to developing a standard for it? Kushner presents PJ Harvey as an image. Where’s the appreciation of the music? One’s own greatness need not be paramount. In fact, become too consumed with it and one risks missing out – and worse, no closer to greatness, in any sense. Freud says that for some, aesthetic experience is comparable to erotic experience. As I write this, I listen to Isaac Hayes’s “Joy, Pt 1.” 

Rachel Kushner is better than good. And her appreciation is expressed elsewhere, such as in pieces on other writers: Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector. (I’ll give the last another try.) One reason I’ll be buying The Hard Crowd and revisiting it is an essay about her breakthrough novel The Flamethrowers, once I’m through reading it. And for those of you who, like me, consider Kushner a writer to watch: She has two more on the way.

Studies in Ridonculousness: Evel Knievel is Jesus, Apparently

My studies in ridonculousness continue with Viva Knievel! (1977), a film starring a man once famed for daring motorcycle feats and sustaining severe injuries when they went awry. Watching movies like this is also daring, in a way. Not all terrible movies are good. Some are bad: baffling, inept, and, crucially, no fun, making them a complete waste of time. And some are just as baffling and inept but less than no fun, more bizarre, disturbing, and, depending on how long one cares to endure them, insanemaking. All fans of the ridonculous movie experience have a moment of crisis in which, holding their heads, they ask themselves: What am I doing with my life? I don’t want to waste my time. And I’d prefer not to lobotomize myself sitting through every minute of the absolute worst of the worst movies ever made. But it’s not always easy to tell which route the terrible movie will take from the start. My answer is to spend less of my life watching, imposing a time limit. Five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. If I’m bored or frightened, if I’m feeling pain in the forehead region I didn’t have when I started it, I shut it off and try my best to forget. Minutes are an acceptable loss! for the chance of discovering properly ridonculous cinema. 

A note on the word “ridonculous.” You won’t find it in Merriam-Webster's dictionary. Yet. For now I look to a website I don’t visit often, the Urban Dictionary, which relies on postings by users and a voting system. The posting with the most votes is from 2004 by 755coop3: “Functionally similar to the word ‘ridiculous,’ this word is often used in its place for extra emphasis. Example: There's a ridonculous amount of cheddar cheese stuck in the printer.” (Not a secret posting of mine.) But no provenance or noun form is provided. Scroll further down and doof0000, in another entry, informs readers that Roald Dahl uses the word “redunculus” in a children’s book called The BFG, published in 1982. I’m not sure where I picked it up from. A family friend? I didn’t realize the term went back as far as 1982, well before I started using it and meditating upon it (and before I was born). No joke, I thought it was my neologism! Anyway, ridonculousness, as a concept, is mutant ridiculousness: Take a rainbow afro wig. A banana hammock. A bazooka. Several blocks of cheddar cheese. Throw them into a vat of toxic waste. Season with a pinch or brick of cocaine, if you like. And stand back. Ridonculous. One can imagine or casually observe or trip on the sidewalk and into the ridiculous any day of the week. The ridonculous is unimaginable until someone (usually unwittingly) creates it or becomes it. In the former case, it’s an action movie based around a fusion of gymnastics and martial arts no one asked for called Gymkata. In the latter, it’s the living embodiment of ridonculousness, Vanilla Ice.  (Who also starred in one movie: Cool as Ice. In a word: Ridonculous.) 

Well, I finished Viva Knievel! And it didn’t even take five minutes to determine that I would. The movie shows promise from scene one: Knievel, in the leather jumpsuit-clad, winged haircut role of himself, sneaks into an orphanage at night to deliver toys to children. His presence causes one kid to throw off his crutches and walk unassisted. As the movie progresses, Knievel is never once found to do wrong. (From the Viva Knievel! theme song: “He’s a motorcycle bird/who is never coming down.”) He lives cleanly. He’s loyal to a fault. He won’t be cheated in business. He’s passionately anti-drug, turning the movie into half-PSA. So wholesome. During a dramatic scene, he’s accused by one character, almost incoherently, of having a flaw: caring too much for a vulnerable child. Viva Knievel! is feature-length promotion for Evel Knievel, modern day Jesus.

 

He has his enemies. The plot involves career sabotage, drug smuggling, murder, and blah, let’s discuss some satisfying absurdities. 

A photojournalist arrives to take pictures of Knievel in the event of a crash. She insists on being addressed not as miss but ms. [mizz]. Knievel rancorously says: “Oh, you’re one of them.” He means a feminist. After the label further defines her as antagonistic and shrill, her political views are never mentioned again. Once she’s done with her assignment, she plans on heading to South America to document a revolution. “Aw, they’re always having revolutions down there!” says Knievel. But the feminist gets caught up in Knievel’s exploits and, by the end, the movie simply assumes she’s fallen in love (and perhaps given up her career, renounced feminism, and converted to the Knievel religion).   

One of Knievel’s main acolytes in the movie is a child, the son of his assistant. I mock his lines thusly: Gee, Mr. Knievel! You’re the best, Mr. Knievel! Golly, Mr. Knievel! And with a pouty face for awards consideration: Say it ain’t so, Mr. Knievel. (Sowwy, “Evel.”) 

After Knievel is injured in a crash (and drama is abruptly and fleetingly introduced with the sudden announcement of his retirement), he’s taken to the hospital, where he lies in bed. This scene best sums up the quality of his acting: he can’t even lie in bed resting convincingly.

  

In a movie with much to do about drugs, there had to be a drug freakout. It’s performed by a name I recognize from movies I can’t stand: Gene Kelly.  

The dullest aspect of the movie by far, ironically, is the reason it exists in the first place: the messiah’s stunts. Since he’s limited to jumping over things, the filmmakers include a lot more buildup than (meager) payoff. The movie ends with Knievel finally sticking the landing. Unwittingly true. 

With fairly catchy theme song: “Viva, Viva Knievel/Viva, Viva K-nie-vel!”

 

Horror Stories

     Eva’s Man (1976), Gayl Jones’s second novel, isn’t notable for scenes or sentences, voices or characters. It’s a serviceable rendering of a lived-in, monochrome world. And that world is sickening. This effect is the novel’s sole distinction. The narrator, Eva, achieves this by recounting her history with men and boys, nearly all of whom are sexual predators.

The structure is fragmentary, chapters and sections only loosely organizing the whole. It mimics the hazy, shifting memory of a reticent, evasive woman becoming unhinged. As such, it isn’t always clear what’s going on, which seems mostly to be the point, and individual pieces lack pith, which likely isn’t. Though Eva veers between various periods of her life within each chapter, basically the novel moves (or oozes) forward: A murder, postmortem genital mutilation, and the abuse, witnessed and experienced, behind her crimes.

Jones has described Eva’s Man as a horror story. She nearly let it go out of print, having second thoughts about the harshness of her depiction of black men. (There was no need to worry. Every lewd remark and nauseating act she writes about could be attributed to certain men of any race. The evidence is a mere Google search away. There was no need to worry about the book.) The pain is painful and so is the pleasure. It’s graphic, without much letup.

I took more than a few breaks: Emerson. Like Seneca, an influence of his, indelible lines, questionable lines, moving lines, and howlers mingle together. And Pokémon. I’ll write the entry for my biographical timeline: “November 2022 – David Alvarado read Balzac and Emerson. On his latest Pokémon adventure, he went with a twelve Pokémon rotation, having demoted his Gumshoos (nicknamed, for reasons unknown to scholars, 'Gooj popolo') to PC limbo.” And movies, some of which gave me pause. In one, an alleged classic from the 40s, The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on an alleged classic by James M. Cain, a man unbothered by moral qualms and blind to any obstacle between him and his desire, or between desire and gratification, steals a kiss from another man’s wife. He has absolutely nothing to recommend him. Yet the viewer is supposed to believe the wife surrenders helplessly to a stranger’s charmless hunger or force of will. Lana Turner. With that guy, among the most unlikely candidates for a smoldering love affair. Talentless homely drifter degenerate lucky to live in an age before background checks. And it’s presented as merely bad behavior, not as ludicrous and creepy. Another horror story. The Criterion Collection actually featured an array of horror movies (of the 80s) in October. One can find more fantastical entries in the genre, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s near-perfect Near Dark or Jack Sholder’s obscure gem The Hidden. And one can also find the porous boundary between horror and crime, or horror and reality, in such movies as George Sluizer’s The Vanishing, which brings to mind examples outside of the 80s, such as Bob Clark’s Black Christmas or a favorite of mine, one of the best crime/horror movies I’ve ever seen, David Fincher’s Zodiac. I once watched it in the Castro Theater, where everyone was shocked into silence, except one man somewhere in the audience, who broke it with a laugh. A sinister laugh. Which brings me back to the novel. 

Eva’s Man is a fairly punishing read but not pointlessly so.

The Literary Life, 3

     Martin Amis's late friend Christopher Hitchens advised a student to seek him out for his superlative comedy. Roberto Bolaño considered him one of the best writers in English and counted The Information (1995), a comic novel, among his favorites. I can't ignore their recommendations. And there's less-than-average risk involved: Should I find myself unable to share their enthusiasms (and I have), still got to know them better. But Hitchens on literature is my least favorite Hitchens, as far as his tastes and judgments go. And Bolaño also liked Night Train, Amis's crime novel, which I thought good but not so distinct or haunting that I had to see, in the immediate future, what else he could do. In the wider literary world, he doesn't seem to be an eminence of our time, exactly, and he's not obscure, either. What I remember most clearly as it pertains to him and his work are some of his rather annoying thoughts on reading and writing, not for what he thinks but how he thinks, in curiously disputable fashion. Amis on Franz Kafka's The Trial: "Unfinished by him and unfinished by us." "Us"? ("The discerning" would be my guess for an appropriately haughty retort.) Another of his: "I don't want to write a sentence that any guy could have written." No writer can ensure that every single sentence is like no other in a language more than one person writes in. Yet his untenable aesthetic standard, applied to his reading, once led him to dismiss an entire body of work because he'd come across a cliché. One bad sentence and you're supplying the grocery store with thrillers. In which case every writer, ever, can be tossed out now, including Martin Amis. This is according to a writer in the Irish Times, who once dismissed Amis's work because of a bad sentence. It was a bad (overwritten) sentence. The musician's guitar will go blurt, the baller will get to his spot and hit nothing but air, and the writer will let a shoddy sentence slip into an otherwise sound page. I can't remember Amis's bad sentence. And I find it absurd to reject him - or any writer, for that matter - entirely on that basis. So Amis takes the Nabokov stance, I take the Borges stance, and I started The Information guardedly.

It's satire about a form of literary hell. As a young writer, Richard Tull gets his start writing "eye-catchingly vicious" book reviews. He uses the momentum to publish a couple of novels, two books so difficult readers can't decide whether they're good or not. His followup novels, written in the same uncompromising mode, go unpublished. Now in middle age, with a wife and two children, he makes a meager living cobbling together whatever relevant work he can: reviewing thick biographies of figures he deems inconsequential, reading and marking submissions at a self-publisher that offends his literary principles, and editing a moribund arts magazine called The Little Magazine. His marriage has gone cold, his wife Gina (the primary earner) setting a deadline for when he must end his literary career. He's balding, impotent and  in awful shape, mentally and physically. Meanwhile, his "oldest and stupidest" friend, Gwyn Barry, has become a global publishing sensation with books Tull thinks are trash. He can't stand it. Plunging into what he acknowledges is madness, he sets out to "mess Gwyn up," as the back cover gently puts it. Amis proceeds to mess Tull up further, battering him relentlessly with fresh miseries and humiliations. I'm one of those readers who approaches all satire warily: more rage? Hope there's just cause. The narrator, Martin Amis, refers to Tull as an asshole and that alone wouldn't qualify. But his entry in the genre isn't too harsh or bleak or even unforgiving for consumption, for several reasons.

The Hitch hasn't disappointed me. And my view of Amis has changed. From what little I'd picked up beforehand, I didn't suspect he was particularly amusing at all. But The Information is, and in more than the usual one or two ways. His taste for pure silliness partially disarms me: 

Of the pressures facing the successful novelist in the mid-1990s Richard Tull could not easily speak. He was too busy with the pressures facing the unsuccessful novelist in the mid-1990s - or the resurgent novelist, let's say (for now): the unproved novelist. Richard sat in Coach. His seat was non-aisle, non-window, and above all non-smoking. It was also non-wide and non-comfortable.

He can be risqué (or impure) in his ridiculousness:

[Richard] kissed the boys as often as he could. His knowledge told him that boys should be hugged and kissed by their fathers - that what fucked men up was not being hugged and kissed by their fathers. Richard had not been hugged and kissed by his father. So he told himself to regard his relationship with his sons as purely sexual.

Tull steps out of the shower. "As Richard dried himself his chest was suddenly remoistened by the thought that he was - and had long been - nuts in the Johnson." Capital "J" [sic?].

Passing observations: Tull, in distress, walking around with all ten fingertips on his forehead. Someone's "intense sneer of puzzlement." (Try it at home!) Eyes of a loving husband that "bulge uxoriously." A meal of "sauce-glued nachos" (one of two nacho japes). 

He gets laughs in dialogue, builds them cumulatively and at paragraph-length...

He gets them with affection for the everyday comedy of family life. And irrepressible affection for his kids, even when Tull appears to be impatient with or distant from them, is what, arguably above all, complicates Amis's depiction of him. The second reason his novel of degradation and madness works: Tull isn't so bonkers that he can't enjoy his kids. In one scene, his son sings a simple song he made up about how much he likes his father and his father likes him. Tull is pleased but also criticizes his rhyming skills, inwardly. And he notes that his wife doesn't sing songs like that. And he remembers the time when, shocked and infuriated by the latest example of Gwyn Barry's scandalously good fortune, he overreacted to something his son had done and slapped him. He'd apologized repeatedly afterward. His son only replied: "we all have our bad days." Forgiveness like a salve. The book is primarily satire but Amis's humor isn't wholly corrosive. And, without jarring the reader, he can suddenly pause it for a genuinely tender or lovingly observed moment. It's satire with the customary exaggerations (that aren't always so exaggerated) as well as some unexpected nuances and light.

A third reason: Since Tull's torment is literary, the novel has the appeal of an insider's account of that world. One of the best lines of the book:

Like most young reviewers, Richard had come in hard. But instead of getting softer, more catholic, more forgiving (heading toward elderly impartiality and, beyond that, journey's end: a gurgling stupor of satisfaction with everything written) Richard had just got harder. 

Similar fun is had with novel writing, literary agents, radio interviews, readings, signings and other common features of the life. But more than that, Amis, in Tull and Barry, has worthy targets. Something absent from the book is love of literature. Not ready or willing to call it love? Scared of your love? Then the conviction or the nebulous nagging feeling the reader's life would be poorer without the book, without the search for books, without the music of considered language, without penetrating thought, without the guide. Literature gives Tull nothing to relieve or make sense of his sufferings and he won't try his hand at something more pleasurable or profitable. His ego won't let him admit that he may be wrong, that he isn't as great as he somehow came to believe, that he isn't owed an audience and the briefcase full of cash. To figure out what the obstacle to progress is, one requires a measure of self-curiosity. But Tull is incurious about himself. Instead of using a literary method, finding his answer in reading or writing, Tull's true, inexorable descent as a writer begins when he steps outside the bounds of literature to sabotage his enemy (his only friend) by any means, from chicanery to outright physical violence (though without the modicum of courage it would take to commit the act himself). Any writer who can't fight out in the open honestly is no real writer. The fake writer is deluded or delusive or, most poisonously, what Lichtenberg refers to as a deluded deluder. For presuming to consider himself a real writer (in addition to doing things like scheming to get Barry's wife hooked on coke and/or pregnant with his child) Tull is demolished. And I nod sagely. To this unsympathetic reader and reviewer of biography, Amis says: And what if I wrote your biography? On the other side is Barry, who spends much time contemplating how his own biography will read when he's not perusing his stack of newspapers and magazines, looking for any mention of Gwyn Barry. Amis is equally incisive about a squalid literary success.

The novel prompts me to differentiate between a writer of splendid sentences - aesthetically pleasing, impressive, quotable - and a writer who uses language distinctly but is more of an acquired taste. The first belongs to a small group generally recognized for prose style. The second belongs to no group and engenders every response: laudatory, indifferent, derisive. Given his past remarks, I thought Martin Amis would be in the first group. And he is capable of writing sentences that would gain him entry:

Once, in the street, on an agitated April afternoon, on his way back from lunch with some travel editor in some transient trattoria, he had seen a city cyclone of junkmail - leaflike leaflets, flying flyers, circling circulars - and had nodded, and thought: me, my life.

From above. Imagine clouds as you would be seeing them for the first time: on your way in. Clouds would be telling you about the earth. About its cliffs, its mountains and plateaus, its pastures and snowfields. Clouds would be telling you about its sandbars and sandflats, and insistently telling you (seven-tenths of the time) about its oceans and their postures of turbulence and calm. From above, even though the beauty of the clouds had lost some of their innocence, their pristine aura of eternal unregardedness, because nearly everyone from below had seen them now, the sky was telling outsiders about the earth.

Mostly, however, at least in The Information, Amis is more of the second kind of writer. Okay, he writes countless sentences that could be mistaken for those of most any other writer. ("Gwyn awoke," "it was ten o'clock," etc.) He also writes countless sentences that aren't pretty, aren't mini-events in themselves, and that the average writer could conceivably write but wouldn't necessarily think to write: "We are agreed - come on: we are agreed - about beauty in the flesh," "He had a reputation as a. He made no secret of his love of. To him, the fairer." Non-standard, informal sentences, the change-up however minor: a peculiar rhythm, a surprising colon or semicolon, the slight modification provided by an adjective or an adverb, italics, rhyming. And there's one other aspect to his language that struck me and merits special attention. About a third of the way into the book, I began to notice one of his verbal tics:

There she stood, in light lipstick and light pancake and light woollen suit, holding her teacup in joined palms.

Kafka's beetle didn't just pretend to like lying around on unswept floors beneath items of disused and disregarded furniture. To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.

To get them through this debate, Richard had to smile. And if it hurts when you smile, you realize how often you smile when you don't want to - how often your smiles are smiles of pain. He knew from mirrors how his smiles made him look.

While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigarette.

 

Once I picked up on how frequently he repeats words and phrases, diminishing somewhat the overall effect it has rhetorically, I began counting and got 107 formulations like the above in about 200 pages. I've never encountered another writer who does it and it engenders every response from me. Gwyn Barry's language is easy enough to handle but "barbarically plain." Richard Tull's language causes headaches and sudden illnesses. And somewhere in the middle, in effect, is Martin Amis: jolting, arresting, fatiguing, abrading.

Throughout, he integrates material about the universe but I can't think of a strong connection it has to the main narrative. No one reflects on their existence. No one is an astrophysicist or astronomer. It furnishes some metaphors about the characters, though without a stronger connection it can seem like an arbitrary interpolation, applicable to any fiction about people and their microscopic lives, in the context of universal time. ("It might help if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.") It's another form of information so doesn't come off as pretentious, more like a failed attempt at approaching the fiction from another angle. And while I'm admitting to what I haven't picked up, I'm drawing a blank about his conception of that word which is the title of the book. It's used at least a dozen times in the novel, is emphasized to generate a force I never feel the impact of. As a result, I'm not quite sure of what to make of his ending. 

Back on firm ground, I have misgivings about what constitutes the wisdom of the book, namely about men and women. His satirical portraits are mostly persuasive, with the exception of a woman who specializes in obscure women writers, which is what partly makes her a joke. And everything about her, including signs of mental instability and her eventual suicide, is a joke. Then there are asides like these:

All men are eternally confronted by this: other men, in blocs and sets. Equipped with an act, all men are confronted by an audience which might cheer or jeer or stay silent or yawn rancorously or just walk out - their verdict on your life performance.

And men attended only one school of acting (the method), that of the cool. That's men. That's men for you: hams of cool.

The bell rang ending lunchtime long ago. I have no act. Certain men have an act. It shows. As do women - certain women. And I'm not putting on a show for an audience every day of my life because, as Harold Bloom observes in Genius, it really means living two lives simultaneously, as performer and spectator, watching closely, guts knotted, forever sweating your own performance. Which ends in madness. The cool head is fostered offstage and permits consideration of facts the overheated head doesn't. For example: The crowd is unlikely to be of one opinion. (If it is, think: horror movie, authoritarian regime, dystopia.) And not all those opinions, plural, will be informed or sophisticated or generous. To believe otherwise is to let anyone who comes along twist you as he or she sees fit. The very fear of that crowd will warp you before you even face it.

"Poets got women. They didn't get anything else, and women sensed this; so they got women": It is a halting read, as I get lost shaping replies to this stuff.

A split. Another instance in which I'm not in agreement with Bolaño. Although The Information is almost totally different than Night Train: proof of Amis's range, of his refusal to settle. It's mixed but memorable.