Artist: Patrick Nevins |
Are disasters, natural or man made, ever the thing for satire? Is it appropiate that the creative and satiric spirit find humor in revealing humans at their most self-conceptually eviscerated, when their individual and collective sense of pride, competence and confidence in a world that works sanely is torn from them suddenly, no warning, leaving them to scramble and behave by instinct, not philosophy? A better question would be whether the comedy was funny and, of course, whether it created a distance , of a kind, through which we can learn more about this problematic quality informally termed "being human". In White Noise, the effect was comic, funny,
and all ironies laid in the day were comedies of the clueless trying to make
peace with the nagging changes that cause everyone to avoid the void as they
try to retool old habits with new explanations, theories, contrived proofs that
the world will return to normal. Now it's tragedy, and the quality of irony
finds itself made ironic. The attack on the World Trade Center puts us beyond
abstractions like comedy or tragedy, on which one can grasp onto something
fixed in their minds as a normality they can get back to. All is muted,
rendered mute. Rationalization is deferred. And our expectations of what
DeLillo would make of the penultimate attack on America's symbolic sense of
being the world's best asset mounted to levels that were nearly toxic with
glee.
DeLillo,
however, is a writer who might have played out his themes and investigations of
a hyper-technological democracy whose inhabitants are searching for a useful
past as a way to make the fractured, reshuffled and de-centered present to at
least seem to have thematic continuity. "Falling Man", the 9/11
novel, strikes me as a book of riffs from a musician who can barely muster the
energy to run through his songbook one more time. In the odd sense, in the
cruelly ironic sense, it's a tragedy that the attack on the World Trade Center
attack happened after DeLillo hit his peak with "Underworld", as
masterful of novel of America our propensity for distracting ourselves in
ritual, obsessions, insane hobbies and esoteric systems of
knowledge--performance art, baseball history, high finances, unrepentant
consumerism, ceaseless works of charity--to keep the suspicion that all our
material gains and assumptions are based on no fixed moral platform.
There
are some fine sentences here, some splendid descriptions, but there is
listlessness as well. "Falling Man" is finally dull, and even
DeLillo's prose mastery can't make this alternating saga of survivor despair
and terrorist preparation rise above the merely serviceable. DeLillo is
overwhelmed by the topic, not so much for the impossibility of writing a
brilliant novel in the post-attack atmosphere, but because all the themes he
has relevant to the present condition are expressed more powerfully,
poetically, with larger and surer measures of canon-making genius than the
comparatively provincial exercise the author has issued here. It’s also a
matter of whether beautiful writing is appropriate for a novel specifically
concerning itself with the physical and psychic costs of 9-11; folks like Laura
Miller, Meghan O’Rourke and Frank Rich have wrestled with the issue of whether
drawing metaphors and similes for larger contemplation is somehow immoral when
addressing the events so catastrophic and fatal. Art, in the uppercase, means
framing the materials and objectifying them, taking them from their contexts
and positioning them in ways that will force a deliberation over their existence;
this is the aesthetic distance, beauty removed from our hands and set aside so
we can contemplate some feelings in absence of real world distraction. 9-11, though,
is thought by many to be above such contemplation, that this date cannot be
abstracted as material for art making, literary reflection.
Brat
Pack novelist Jay McInerney got urge to step up to the plate and write a
Great American Novel, a work that would raise him finally from the middle rungs
of the literary ladder and allow him to reach the top shelf where only the best
scribes--Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Thomas Wolfe!-- sit and cast their long
collective shadow over the fields of aspiring geniuses, furious scribblers all.
McInerney has selected a large subject with which to make his reputation, the
catastrophe that was and remains 9/11. Acutely aware that the minor league
satires and soft coming of age stories that made his name were less commanding
than they had been because "9/11 changed everything" (a phrase destined
to be the characterizing cliché of this age) he offers us The Good Life, a
mixed bag of satiric thrusts, acute social observation, two dimensional
characterizations and wooden generalizations about the sagging state of
society, of culture, of our ability to understand one another, locally and
globally.
I agree
that Jay McInerney is a better writer than he's been credit, but history will
judge his novels as minor efforts at best. Witty and observant, yes he is, but
the manner in which he conveys his best lines, his choicest bon mots have the
thumbed-through feeling of a style borrowed. Fitzgerald, Capote and John
Cheever are his heroes, true, but there's nothing in McInerney's writing that
honors his influences with the achievement of a tone and personality that is
entirely his own, an original knack of phrase making that makes a reader wonder
aloud how such wonderful combinations of words are possible. His influences,
alas, are visible and seem to be peering over his shoulder. Even what one would
praise as sharp and elegant observations from his keyboard creaks not a little.
The style sounds borrowed, and our author sounds much, much too dainty to make
it really cling to the memory:"The hairstylist was aiming a huge
blow-dryer at his wife's skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and
pink--memento more--in the jet of hot air ... "
McInerney
is compared to Fitzgerald relentlessly since his career as a professional
writer began, in so much he, like Fitzgerald, was bearing witness to a
generation of conspicuous consumption and waste, but one notices that any
random paragraph from The Great Gatsby contains more melody by far. The writing
genius of Fitzgerald, when he was writing at his absolute best, was his ability
to make you forget the fact that you're reading elegant prose and have you
become entranced by it. It was a means to put you in a different world
altogether. It's this simple, really; you didn't see him writing, and you
didn't see him sweat. Able craftsman as well as peerless stylist when he was
performing best, Fitzgerald's prose seemed natural, buoyant, unstrained.
McInerney's writing reveals that strain, that slaving over phrase and clever remark,
and often times the effect seems calculated. In his best moments, he rarely
sheds the sophomore flash; after all these years our Manhattan golden boy still
writes like the most gifted student in a Kansas City composition class. After
all these years he is still trying to outrace the long shadows of those who
brought him reading pleasure.
This is
a wandering and traipsing along the subject matter like a drunken tourist
gawking at the bizarre ways of the big city, a laughable and loathsome tour of
Corn's intellectual baggage.
"Windows on the World", a poem written by Alfred Corn and
published in Slate on September 11, 2003,is an ill conceived poem commemorating
the attack on the World Trade Center that would seem to confirm the skeptic's
view that poets are willfully suffering narcissists who think everything in the
world is in play in order to disturb their peace. In other words, to fuck with
them. It's strange, odd, perverse, and somewhat immoral to write a poem using
the 9/11 attack as a pretext to write another self-infatuated poem that really
is more about how much the writer thinks about himself and his assignation as a
"poet"; whatever the god damned what Corn puts on his tax return as
"occupation" has to do with the still barely speakable horror this
day has come to mean is beyond any sense I can find, and worse, it is beyond
anything useful to others.
Connecting
the attack with the crashing of Windows operating system is a ploy him to
remain a thousand miles from any connection with real emotion; it is
relentlessly ironic and snobby in its form as a poem. The subject matter, the
real horror is aestheticized out of mind the way a narcotic lulls one into a
stupor and then a nod against a world that still must be faced and made sense
of. Corn does none of that at all, but what he does do is give us a long,
wavering and arrogantly ambivalent stretch of muddled semiotics where
everything is a straining reach, a forced association, a willful perversion of
real imagist reach. Had the subject not been so grim and disheartening, this
would seem more parody than anything else. This poem angers me to no end. If
Corn was paid for this piece, he should feel honor bound to donate the sum to a
cause that actually gives hope to others in the human community. Following
that, he might quit whatever teaching job he as in the instruction of writing
and get a job in the receiving area of a Salvation Army Thrift store.
Astore.
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