These are some of the central questions posed by Don DeLillo’s sprawling Underworld. The first one’s a whopper, isn’t it? “We” – the first person plural – begs an answer bigger than any one of us can offer, implying entire ecosystems of culture, parenting, questioning, and history (personal and otherwise). The solipsistic construction hints at uncertainty – about the fragile nature of memory, of consciousness itself. We’re revising our answer even as we try to compose it.

DeLillo’s question, asked by a Jesuit clergyman leading up to the novel’s conclusion, seems to be addressed directly to the reader, directly to America itself. To us. Who are we? Where did we come from? And what does the answer tell us about the future?

The characters in this book are assimilated into American culture through a whole host of teachers: priests, parents, mentors, friends, and lovers. For these children of the Cold War, math class was supplemented with bomb drills designed to instill a constant state of paranoia, replete with dog tags to facilitate identification in the event of an atomic attack by the Russians.

But what if your most important teachers – your parents – are missing, or drunk … or have just given up? This is Nick Shay’s dilemma, the central character in the novel, whose father walked out “for a pack of cigarettes” when Nick was only eleven. How is Nick to grow into a responsible young man without a father figure?

From the opening line, the answer lies in language itself: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” Language is always coming to the rescue: as a defense against some apocalyptic menace (in the hip, slick, subversive riffing of Lenny Bruce during the Cuban Missile Crisis), a means to hide our deepest secrets from others, and thus hoard power (in the clipped, repressed inner dialogue of J. Edgar Hoover and his lover), a means of coping with adolescent angst (in the rich, textured banter bandied by Nick as he climbs his way out of a dead-end Bronx adolescence), and the moral compass guiding our interactions with others (in the contemplative nostalgia of an older, wiser Nick).

DeLillo is fascinated with film. Or, more accurately, with our cultural fascination with film. In the novel’s prologue, he steadily draws the reader into an historic baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, when Bobby Thompson hit “the shot heard ’round the world” off a pitch from Ralph Branca to deliver the National League pennant to the Giants (”The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”). Using an almost cinematic approach, he variously describes the “small reveries and desperations” of the crowd, the slow, graceful interplay between the baseball players, the gruff banter of the sports announcers calling the game, the comic ribbing between J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and immense nightclub owner Toots Shor.

By the time the game has built to its fabled conclusion, DeLillo is able to cut quickly from one major group of characters to another, move the action or emotion forward with a few short sentences, and build a perfect collage of “the body heat of a great city” just as it’s about to enter the long, paranoid tunnel of the Cold War. Glimpsed from the mid 1990’s, as the characters reflect on their often misguided youth of the 50’s and 60’s, the Cold War offers at least an organizing principle for our cultural tendency to violence.

But now that the Cold War is over – what organizing principle do we have left? Do we bury our secrets? Our nuclear waste, unseen evidence of so many decades of war and paranoia? Nick, the former Bronx tough turned Arizona toxic waste disposal executive, does just that. He trots across the globe, digs holes miles underground, buries bright vats of toxic waste, even travels to Russia to explode some depleted nuclear sludge (ironically) via a violent, subterranean explosion.

How do we know what we know? And how are we supposed to behave once we know it? DeLillo doesn’t give us the answers directly – he doesn’t preach or sermonize. What he does do is shine a light on our violent cultural impulses. There’s a kind of aspirational freedom promised by violence, which Nick, looking back, describes perfectly:

But “dumb-muscled” force isn’t the answer, and Nick knows this. He’s seen the deformed Russian toddlers, maimed by nuclear fallout, playing in the fields downwind from Chernobyl. He understands that being “a danger to others” is inconsistent with life in a free, civilized, society. Violence is instead a kind of catalyst towards self-knowledge, “pain is just another form of information”. The only way the dead-end, youthful Nick can aspire to some semblance of normal adulthood (the only way he can survive), is through a kind of baptism by fire. Violence will shatter him, and the resulting self-knowledge will remake him into responsible citizen: reformed, civilized, tamed.

After his crime, Nick learns to “see” the world literally at the feet of the Jesuits:

Nick “sees” the “rough slur”. Language shapes his impressions of the world. And later, as he begins to expand his vocabulary, he starts seeing a bigger picture:

I’ve only touched on a few of the themes DeLillo explores in this amazing, important (and massive, at 800+ pages) Great American Novel, DeLillo’s level best effort at trying “to make sense” of our cultural hangover from the Cold War. The intensity of the prose, the incisiveness of the insights into American history, and the depth of characterization here are unparalleled in literature (at least in my opinion). The fractured relationships between fathers and sons; the mythological home run baseball, pursued by Nick and others through the decades, serving as some symbol of a time that never really was; the symbiotic relationship between the creative and the warlike impulses; the redemptive power of art, of language … it’s all here.

And the final word of the novel? The one that allows us to rise above our dark, secret, checkered past and imagine a future free from secrets, free from conflict, free from the omnipresent dread of the Cold War?

“Peace.”

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

But Frank Bascombe, the middling protagonist from Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, isn’t your typical sportswriter. A failed novelist who now writes sentimental sports anecdotes for a slick, nationally-known magazine, Frank admires the blank simplicity of the athletes he spends his days interviewing:

But Frank doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything at all. The recent death of his son, followed by a string of meaningless affairs and a quick, seemingly amicable divorce, has left Frank in a kind of numbed stupor: what he calls his “dreaminess”. Throughout the story, Frank refers to his ex-wife only as “X”, and we see only the sketchiest portraits of his remaining two children, when Frank drifts into and out of their lives on his quest for … what, exactly?

Richard Ford’s prose takes some getting used to in this novel. It reminded me somewhat of John Updike’s, but with more precision and intensity. Ford has an ability to conjure the details of everyday life with such beauty and grace that you’re tempted to just go along for the ride and follow Frank along on his aimless, yet keenly-observed, wanderings.

And yet that would be a mistake. Because there’s a genius in this novel that doesn’t fully come to light until the last one hundred pages or so. Frank can’t be trusted: he will say one thing, and then do another. He wants to be fully engaged in the moment, in what “he’s doing”, and yet he keeps distracting himself (and us) from what’s really going on; Frank doesn’t want to confront his grief and emptiness, and so turns to the comforting presence of material goods (his house, his manicured lawn, his token girlfriend, his lobster dinner and afternoon cocktail) to keep what we begin to sense is a looming existential crisis at bay.

I was annoyed with Frank for this duplicity, annoyed that he never spoke what was really on his mind, and worried that the novel wouldn’t ever force Frank to account for the discrepancy between his thoughts and his actions. But then towards the end of the novel, Frank finally does say what’s on his mind. At a dinner with the parents of his girlfriend Vicki, Frank engages in a back-and-forth with Vicki’s father about sports writing:

With this dialogue, we finally get a glimpse into what Frank’s thinking. He’s a rugged individualist, a hero worshipper; and yet Frank is just like everyone else, and displays no heroic tendencies himself. But for the first time in the story, Frank has spoken his innermost thoughts … and the consequences are disastrous. Within the hour, Frank’s life is briefly turned upside down, and the looming sense of doom felt throughout the book finally arrives. Will Frank overcome his paralysis, rise to the occasion, and write the sentimental portrait of the failed football star he’s been trying half-heartedly to draft throughout this long, Easter weekend? Or will he, yet again, avoid confronting the difficult storm inside, and retreat into a new girl, distraction, or daydream? The stakes seem enormous, for inaction might deliver a fate worse than paralysis:

This was a great story, and in the end Frank Bascombe’s unexamined life becomes a mirror for an America that seems more concerned with flash over substance, with the idea of a world where everyone could be a hero.

If only someone would decide to step up to the plate, and actually take on the responsibilities that heroism might entail.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

In a strangely retro New York City, Lila Mae Watson is the only black woman employed within the ranks of the Department of Elevator Inspectors. An “Intuitionist” who can telepathically sense whether or not an elevator is defective, Lila Mae has a perfect record; though the more powerful “Empiricists” in the Elevator Guild are none too pleased about the arcane techniques she employs, which were developed within the liberal campus of the Institute for Vertical Transport by a legendary figure known as James Fulton.

In Whitehead’s metropolis, the politics of verticality take center stage, and Lila Mae soon finds herself caught up in a high-stakes game of pork-barrel politics as played out between her boss, Chancre (head of the Elevator Guild and a proponent of Empiricism) and Orville Lever (an Intuitionist running for president of the Elevator Guild). When an elevator she’s recently inspected suddenly crashes, Lila Mae descends into a Machiavellian underworld where nothing is as it seems, populated by Irish thugs, muckraking journalists, mob bosses, and shifty-eyed campaign managers with questionable scruples.

Whitehead’s Gotham is a city that devours its denizens, with a skyline like “a row of broken teeth”. Buildings “vomit” workers and theatre-goers, “burp their charges out onto the pavement”, and serve to remind the reader that Lila Mae – indeed all of us – are a kind of fodder for the political-industrial machine we call America. Reading this book so closely on the heels of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I was struck by the similarities between the two stories. Whitehead has taken up where Ellison left off, writing a modern-day sequel that attempts to show how difficult it can be to overcome centuries of racial segregation and slavery.

As Lila Mae begins to unravel the mystery of who’s framed her, her story unfolds in taut prose layered with suspense and double meaning. Whitehead’s central conceit is that “white people’s reality is built on what things appear to be – that’s the business of Empiricism. They judge … on how they appear when held up to the light …”

Thus the battle between “the business” of Empiricism and the more spiritual approach of Intuitionism becomes a battle for the soul of the Guild, the city, and the future of the nation.

Whitehead’s sentences are polished to perfection. He describes a building superintendent as “melting as he leads Lila Mae across the grime-caulked black and white hexagonal tile … bulbous head dissolves into shoulders, then spreads into a broad pool of torso and legs.” And there is an extended kind of stag party thrown for the Department, hosted by “Rick Raymond and the Moon Rays”, which gives Don DeLillo’s Lenny Bruce schtick from Underworld a run for its money.

During this same scene, Whitehead returns to Ellison’s idea that racism denigrates everyone involved by making the “seen” invisible, and the “seer” less than human. The party-goers “do not see” Lila Mae or, for that matter, any of the other “colored help” attending to their increasingly debauched needs. Lila Mae suddenly realizes that:

I highly recommend this book to anyone. Slim, at only 250 pages or so, it’s a quick, exciting, and immersing reading experience. It’s an important book, with the power to permanently change how you look at people (not to mention elevators).

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

The book begins atop a bald, muddy hill in Vietnam given the code name Matterhorn by the Marines who occupy the place. The primary protagonist is Second Lieutenant Wayne Mellas, commander of Bravo Company’s First Platoon (Bravo One). Marines were deployed for thirteen months in Vietnam, and Mellas – his first week on the job – is already counting the days until he can “wake up” one morning and catch a flight stateside. As a platoon commander, Mellas is initially viewed with suspicion by his fellow soldiers, who can’t yet know whether he’ll turn out to be a politically-minded “lifer” intent on moving up the ranks quickly … or a trusted soldier who will protect his fellow marines in the thick of battle.

As it turns out, Mellas is both. He’s originally portrayed as a scared kid angling for a leadership role so he can spend less time in the bush. Mellas seems more concerned with scoring political points with Bravo Company’s superior officers than leading his men … who are just as scared, we later realize, as he is. But as the novel progresses, and Mellas begins to realize that the idiotic and often self-serving decisions of his superior officers will mean life or death to him and his men, he gradually transforms into a real leader. It’s an impressive transformation to behold.

Marlantes is at his best when describing the damp and mundane details of military life. The surrounding jungle is crawling with threats: bloodsucking leeches, predatory North Vietnamese Army soldiers, man-eating tigers, ubiquitous jungle rot, life-threatening immersion foot, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes … the list goes on and on. In the first chapter alone, Bravo Company’s corpsman performs field surgery on a grunt’s penis to remove a leech lodged in his urethra. If he doesn’t succeed the man will die from kidney failure, and the experience is so traumatizing for all involved that the surgeon breaks down in tears after the operation.

The dialogue is peppered with the often raunchy shorthand spoken in the Marine Corps (I encourage you to browse the glossary of military slang prior to starting the first chapter). Whites are “chucks”, blacks are “splibs”, soldiers killed in action are “Coors”, out of fuel is “bingo fuel”, and soldiers boil their coffee with clean-burning C-4 to avoid the noxious fumes given off by the typical C-ration heaters. Marlantes is writing from experience, and the gritty realism attests to his time in the bush.

After Bravo Company fortifies Matterhorn with an interlocking maze of nearly indestructible bunkers, they are ordered to abandon the hill to establish a landing and artillery zone atop another hill to their northeast. In the interim, they are led on a death march by their Company commanders. Several soldiers die, and the entire Company comes close to dying of thirst or hunger. They’re eventually rescued and ferried back to the relative safety of Vandegrift Combat Base, where … almost to a man … they recuperate and drink themselves into a weeklong stupor. Some of the best scenes in the novel are between Mellas and his fellow soldiers as they relax and unwind, safe from the constant threat of danger lurking for them out in the bush. There are real tensions between the black and white members of Bravo Company, and Mellas begins to act as a kind of mediator between the different factions within the Company, earning the respect of many.

But after Bravo Company abandons Matterhorn, the NVA move in. Soon Mellas is being asked to lead his men on a mission to take back the hill. He knows this means certain death for many of the kids he’ll be leading, and the final two hundred pages of the novel seem to rush by in an adrenaline-fueled blur of tactical maneuvers and explosions.

There is no doubt that Karl Marlantes knows war, and the pressure that it exerts upon the soldiers caught up in the bureaucratic insanity of it all. He’s given us a glimpse into the way that men bond under the threat of combat, and shows us how, when the danger abates, even briefly, soldiers manage to find other things to fight about: race, religion, rank, politics, morality … but mostly race. I learned more about war in general, and the Vietnam War in particular, from Matterhorn than from any textbook or movie.

All of that being said, the actual writing can sometimes underwhelm. The style veers from overly simplistic, to overly explanatory, to over-written purple prose where Marlantes seems to be trying too hard. Interspersed between all of this are sentences and scenes of real beauty and power. If the author had spent more effort bringing the jungle and Vietnam War to life with well-crafted metaphor, or left more to the reader’s imagination (rather than over-explaining almost every situation), this novel could have been a classic.

As it stands, it’s just a really entertaining and exciting read.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Hugh “Papa” Chance once had a promising baseball career ahead of him. With a blistering southpaw fast ball, a batting average approaching .400, and a ridiculously low earned run average, Hugh was on the fast track to the big leagues when he was waylaid by military service during the Korean War; then a freak accident rendered his left thumb useless. Suddenly trapped in a marriage crumbling under the weight of six children, a dead-end job at the paper mill in Camas, Washington, and a cold wife clinging stridently to her Seventh Day Adventist faith as a lifeline against her secret past of childhood abuse, Papa Chance simply gives up. He begins to sink slowly into long years of alcoholism and despair.

I resisted the novel at first. The narrative voice was hilarious, but the domestic situations the young Kincaid was describing seemed to deserve more introspection than Duncan was providing. After 80 or so pages of reading, I began to wonder: what’s at stake here? But then Kincaid, sitting alone with his dad in the front seat of their car, gets into a heated argument with Papa Chance, taunting him out of his stupor. Papa punches him, hard, in the jaw … and immediately knows his life needs a drastic intervention. From this point on, I was hooked.

Papa Chance has hit rock bottom, and promptly begins to turn his life around. He builds a makeshift pitcher’s mound in the back yard, covers it with a kind of open-faced shed, and begins throwing again. He runs four miles a night and, after almost dying during that first run, quits smoking. He stops drinking. A local surgeon donates his services to perform a quirky surgical operation, and Papa Chance has his big toe transplanted onto his left thumb. Soon he’s throwing fast balls and erratic, diving sliders and curve balls. All the while, the Chance kids are watching from the bushes behind the shed: Everett (the oldest), Peter, Irwin, and Kincaid.

Papa “Big Toe” Chance eventually makes it to the minor leagues again as a pitching coach and “stupid situation” relief pitcher. Back home in Camas, the Chance brothers continue to duel with their mother’s increasingly strict religious views: some of the brothers (namely Everett, Peter, and Kincaid) are beginning to resist her indoctrination. But Irwin, the big-boned, hymn-singing pacifist, continues to stand by Laura Chance’s side. He attends church on the sabbath, even though it means he has to skip Friday night ball games (Irwin, like his dad, is an unnaturally gifted athlete). The twin Chance girls, Freddie and Bet, are split: Freddie sides with her more free-thinking brothers, while Bet sides with Mama and Irwin.

Duncan explores the dichotomy between religion and reason throughout the book, using baseball, the Vietnam War, and the Chance family’s diverse religious views to investigate the impact that fundamentalism can have upon impressionable minds, and to question the sanity of adhering too strictly to a single worldview. But these dialogues are just that … dialogues, spoken between the family members and their friends or pastors or acquaintances … peppered with clever one-liners to lighten what might otherwise seem like very heavy reading. Duncan is a master at walking the tightrope between levity and depth, and I found myself laughing out loud at some of the extended debates between the family members. And the author isn’t afraid to have his characters change one another’s minds: everyone, at some point in this novel, has a steadfast belief which is eventually transformed … usually because of their love for another person.

For example, Everett (the draft dodger) takes it upon himself to correspond with his brother Irwin in Vietnam. Their letters quickly become a kind of group therapy session for Irwin’s entire unit:

This was also the first book I’ve read in a long, long time that had me close to tears. The Chance brothers and sisters come of age during the Vietnam war. Everett becomes a campus radical, burns his draft card, and flees to Canada. Peter attends Harvard to study philosophy, and eventually treks to India in search of some greater truth. Kincaid stays home to finish high school and watch over his younger sisters. But Irwin, the devout Christian pacifist, is drafted into Vietnam, where the senseless killing of a Vietcong boy drives him over the edge. Brutally attacking one of his fellow soldiers in reprisal for the execution, Irwin is severely beaten and shipped back to a mental institution in California. There he undergoes electroshock therapy while under heavy sedation, and quickly begins to turn into a vegetable.

The passages describing Irwin’s descent into a kind of madness, the physical and emotional trauma he experiences, and his family’s dramatic, last-ditch bid to rescue and rehabilitate him are some of the most moving scenes I’ve ever read in literature. Duncan is playing for keeps with this novel, exploring facets of America’s two greatest past-times – Baseball and Religion – with the precision, grace, and wonder of a philosopher and humorist.

The novel isn’t perfect. There are a few loose plot points, hinted at throughout, which are dramatically resolved in the final pages. And Kincaid, the everpresent but strangely undeveloped narrator, is never fully realized as a character … functioning more like a mirror to reflect the reader’s wonder at unfolding events. And Duncan seems to pack his sentences with “golly”s and “betcha”s and other homespun exclamations, which was at times tiring. But these are minor faults: on the whole, this is an excellent book.

I’ll end with one of my favorite passages, summarizing what I think was the novel’s entire theme in a single paragraph, from a letter Everett writes to his future wife:

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

The darkness surrounding him is kept at bay by the brightness of exactly 1,369 light bulbs, loosely hung and powered via a stolen electrical feed from Monopolated Light & Power. There is danger here, and pressure, and mystery. The narrator is in hibernation, hiding from an ominous figure named Ras the Destroyer. But how did he get here? What trauma has he endured? Why does he feel disembodied … “simply because others refuse to see” him?

What’s going on?

What’s going on is a trenchant dramatization of race relations in America. Ellison’s chief theme – that racism dehumanizes all involved participants, essentially blinding them to the real world and making them act as puppets in a tragic comedy – is reinforced throughout the story in fascinating scenes of magical realism (some of them horrific). This is an alternate dimension we’ve entered, where the plot devices of science fiction are employed to bring race and power relations to life.

Ellison’s novel begins with mystery … and then a bang: we’re transported back twenty years to the narrator’s graduation from high school. An articulate, intelligent, and handsome negro, our hero wins a speech competition and is invited to a local white social club to recite his winning entry. But before he is allowed to speak, the members of the club order him, shirtless, into a ring full of scared young black men, blindfold each participant, and force them to beat one another unconscious in a dreadful “battle royal”.

After losing this humiliating contest, the narrator and other boxers are lined up and told to collect an assortment of coins scattered across the floor. Each one of them rushes out onto an electrified piece of flooring, forcing agonized yelps and spastic twitches as they claw feverishly for the coins. Finally, his mouth clotted with the metallic taste of his own blood, the narrator is allowed to deliver his speech. Heckled by the disapproving assemblage of white men, he manages to stumble through obsequiously. He is given a briefcase containing a scholarship to a Southern negro college.

The plot itself seems relatively straightforward: the hero attends college, where he excels until being expelled for taking a white Founder into an undesirable neighborhood (they meet a negro sharecropper who has somehow “accidentally” impregnated his own daughter). Exiled to New York City, the boy then discovers that he has been blacklisted from all respectable employment. But he meets a sensitive white man who offers him a job at a local paint factory, where he is responsible for adding ten drops of black liquid to each can of paint. As he stirs the paint, it turns a brilliant white before his eyes. But our hero eventually uses the wrong mixture, ruins the paint, and is then fired for causing a disastrous explosion. He is given shock treatments in a frightening, sterile hospital until he has recovered, and temporarily loses all sense of himself.

One afternoon he witnesses a sidewalk eviction and, incensed at the treatment of an elderly black couple by the white men evicting them, makes an impromptu speech which triggers a riot against the movers. A member of “The Brotherhood” – a kind of Communist group led by a shadowy cadre of white, privileged men – overhears this speech and enlists the narrator into their ranks. During his first speech, the narrator lights such a fire in the audience’s belly that some members of the Brotherhood want him cast away. He must learn to speak more scientifically, and less emotionally, and is sent to train in the methods of his new brothers.

As his training concludes, the protagonist is given a new name, assigned to Harlem, and begins organizing his fellow brothers and sisters with real skill and enthusiasm. He feels as if he is “making history” – important, successful, alive and highly visible to his fellow men. The media fawn over his speeches. But not everyone is happy: a fellow named Ras the Exhorter (who feels that the Brotherhood is a sham, a proxy for the white power structure already in place) begins to cause trouble for him. The narrator and his friend, brother Tod Clifton, get into a fight with Ras, then flee. Soon the baseless accusations of another brother against the narrator force the Brotherhood to demote him for a time, and he is removed from his post in Harlem and ordered to work in a more remote part of the city until an investigation has been made into his activities.

This begins our narrator’s descent into a disillusioned revolutionary. After strangely voyeuristic affairs with several women, the narrator is returned to Harlem. He finds brother Tod Clifton selling dancing black Sambo dolls on the streets, disgusted with the Brotherhood and its rhetoric. Clifton is shot dead fleeing from the police, and a Harlem race riot erupts in the wake of his funeral. In the days leading up to the riot, the narrator assumes the disguise of a well-heeled character named Rinehart: donning dark sunglasses and a white hat, he is mistaken at times for a pimp, lover, hipster, gambler, crook, and minister.

As the narrator “becomes” Rinehart, people treat him differently depending upon the context in which he appears. He realizes that this man Rinehart has, like a chameleon, managed to adapt to all aspects of “white” society, but at the expense of his own unique identity. The “real” Rinehart, if there is one, remains invisible, unseen. The narrator realizes that he, too, is like Rinehart – the Brotherhood, the school, his employers – they all see him only as a black man, not as an individual. Dressed as himself again, he begins to undermine the Brotherhood’s mission, succinctly phrased in one scene:

The novel ends with a fiery street battle between Ras (now dubbed “the Destroyer”), our hero, the denizens of Harlem, and the mounted police. A fierce Ras, mounted on his own horse and dressed in outrageous tribal battle gear – spear, shield, head-dress and all – is eventually pierced through the cheeks by a spear thrown back at him by the narrator. Our protagonist flees underground to hide from the chaos of the riots, and from Ras, and to think … eventually deciding to end his hibernation and shed his invisible skin: he will emerge a unique individual, in order to speak for all men, no matter the color.

Ellison details this nameless narrator’s path from humiliated youth, to eager student, to disappointed exile, to disillusioned wanderer, to hopeless worker, to hopeful activist, to talented community organizer, to jaded revolutionary, to paranoid lover, to enlightened anarchist with language and imagery reminiscent of jazz (apparently Ellison wrote “on the side” and considered music to be his true calling). The writing is wonderful, truly original from beginning to end.

Initially, the narrator seems somewhat passive, drifting naively along from one flawed institution to another. But this is the novel’s genius: by avoiding a diatribe against these flawed organizations, and instead dramatizing the often comic hypocrisy inherent within them, the actual narrator (Ellison) remains invisible. Working behind the scenes, the author has exposed us to the full range of emotions he has experienced as a black man living in America. By the final lines of the novel, we need no convincing: we believe the protagonist when he says it’s time to rise up out of his basement, and assert his own individuality:

And so Ellison’s hero, now fully aware of the veils that have obscured his vision, emerges from the basement a fully realized human being: colorless, raceless, classless, and empowered to finally use his significant rhetorical skills to awaken others from the nightmare landscape he’s been moving through.

This was an excellent book, containing layer upon layer of symbolism, political metaphor, and mythology. I look forward to reading it again.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Rabbit has all the trappings of adulthood: a son, a job, an apartment, a pregnant wife, a car. But he moves through life like a child, always wanting more from others, never giving back to them, and unaware of the effect his actions might have upon those around him. He can switch from a low-grade amiability to an almost blind cruelty in the blink of an eye. In the first fifty or so pages of the novel, we see Rabbit abandon his pregnant wife and infant son, flee his home town, return, shack up with a prostitute, refuse to let the prostitute use birth control, and knock her up too.

Updike has an amazing power to insert the reader into the skin of his characters. His primary strength as a writer, if I had to pick just one, would be empathy. And Updike understands that young men like Rabbit are thinking, every second of every day, about one thing: sex. He’s nailed the psyche of a certain class of white, adolescent males (sorry, I couldn’t pass that one up). Rabbit is always on the hunt for tail. Whenever he sees a woman, he weighs her sexual assets and liabilities, imagines how she might perform in bed, and passes judgment on her desirability as a sex object … all within the first few seconds.

And women like Rabbit: as a former all-star basketballer in high school, he’s tall, athletic, good-looking, and confident. There’s more action in this novel than in Hugh Hefner’s mansion on Saturday night. But the star of Rabbit’s glory days is fading, and the afterglow isn’t living up to his expectations of it. Trapped in a disappointing suburb in Pennsylvania, in a disappointing job, married to a disappointing wife, with disappointing parents who always seem disappointed in his performance as a son … Harry’s life seems, well, disappointing.

Halfway through this novel, I too was ready to write Updike off as a disappointing writer. I just didn’t like Rabbit. He was coasting through life on his laurels, expecting the world to be handed to him on a platter, believing that his actions were free from all consequences. And Updike’s frequent forays into pages of what one of my college writing professors would call “verbal masturbation” – long, beautiful, expository, seemingly unnecessary, run-on sentences about everything from the way a phone rings to the way a Chinese dinner is assembled on a dining table – began to make my eyes glaze with boredom.

But then Updike introduces a guiding force in Rabbit’s life, an Episcopalian priest named Jack Eccles, who brings an interesting dynamic to the story. Eccles likes Rabbit, and spends months golfing with him, trying to convince Rabbit to return home. Rabbit is reluctant – now shacked up with June, his prostitute girlfriend (who, unbeknownst to Rabbit, is also pregnant), he’s free from all responsibility. Why should he return to his mildly alcoholic, somewhat unintelligent wife? Eccles slowly works with Rabbit; Rabbit repays the priest’s kindness by trying to bang his wife. Finally, when Janice gives birth to their new daughter, Rabbit returns home.

I don’t want to spoil any more of this novel than I already have, so I’ll just say that the results are disastrous. We see that Harry’s actions, in the final analysis, DO have consequences – major, heartbreaking consequences.

But rather than a sudden, transformative salvation, Rabbit continues to run from responsibility. By the end of this novel, you begin to understand that Rabbit cannot be counted on. Or, rather, that he can only be counted on to screw up (or just to screw): Rabbit will say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, hit on the wrong woman. But it all feels “right”, or true, to Rabbit’s character. He’s not malicious … he’s just young, and unaware, and wants more than he thinks a boring life in the suburbs is going to provide.

There are several sequels to this book (I haven’t read any of them yet). I expect that Rabbit sees even more heartache in those future novels, and that he eventually does begin to grow into an adult. Updike cares so much about his characters that, by the end of Rabbit, Run, you can’t help but care a little bit about what kind of man Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom will turn into. Like Eccles, Updike seems to believe that Rabbit can be redeemed. But it will be up to Rabbit to take that first step towards salvation, and stop running away from difficult choices.

Just grow up, dude.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

So I’ve resolved to complete a “DIY MFA in Creative Writing,” utilizing free (or near-free) resources, including: the local library, local Dallas-Ft. Worth writing critique groups, a small network of alpha and beta readers, selective use of freelance editors, and the web. I’ll be trying to complete the first draft of my novel over the course of two years, taking occasional breaks to finish a collection of short stories (6 or 7 of which are complete).

The reading list for this stay-at-home-dad’s MFA is listed below, and reflects my tastes more than anything else. These are the stories I enjoy reading, and will hopefully influence the novel I eventually produce. I’ve read a few of these already, but most will be new. I’ve also sprinkled in some “just for fun” books such as Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.

And so here, in no particular order, is my reading list for the next two years. I’ll get started in early June, and will update you infrequently on my progress and thoughts about each novel:

1. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
2. The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)
3. Underworld (Don DeLillo)
4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
5. 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
6. Oryx & Crake (Margaret Atwood)
7. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski)
8. Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson)
9. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
10. The Brothers K (David James Duncan)
11. Collected Stories (Raymond Carver)
12. American Tabloid (James Ellroy)
13. The Cold Six Thousand (James Ellroy)
14. Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes)
15. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
16. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
17. Drop City (TC Boyle)
18. The Sweet Hereafter (Russell Banks)
19. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
20. Libra (Don DeLillo)
21. Stories (TC Boyle)
22. The Stories of John Cheever (John Cheever)
23. Collected Stories (Amy Hempel)
24. The Sportswriter (Richard Ford)
25. Independence Day (Richard Ford)
26. The Intuitionist (Colson Whitehead)
27. American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
28. Shadow Country (Peter Matthiessen)
29. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
30. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
31. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
32. Disgrace (JM Coetzee)
33. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
34. Tree of Smoke (Denis Johnson)
35. Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
36. The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro)
37. The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
38. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
39. The Art of Racing in The Rain (Garth Stein)
40. Await Your Reply (Dan Chaon)
41. Geronimo Rex (Barry Hannah)
42. High Lonesome (Barry Hannah)
43. Best American Short Stories 2005 (edited by Michael Chabon)
44. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
45. The Things They Carried (Tom O’Brien)
46. Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
47. Escapes (Joy Williams)
48. The Complete Stories (Flannery O’Connor)
49. Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro)
50. Our Story Begins (Tobias Wolff)
51. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
52. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

We’ve fired up the Weber grill, dug around in closets and found our swimming trunks, purchased buckets of sun screen and insect repellent, and are making plans for a 4th of July trip to Michigan to see my little sister.

Here’s a list of things I’m reading this summer as I finish another few short stories and start on a novel of my own:

• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (collection of dark short stories by Wells Tower)
• Little Children (a novel about suburban dystopia by Tom Perotta)
• 2666 (not sure what this is about but I’ve heard rave reviews)
• Glimmertrain Stories (I’ve recently begun submitting stories here and thought I should support the cause)

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

~Samuel Johnson

What’s the number one tool in the writer’s toolbox? You guessed it … his library.

Read, read, read. Read published books. Read literary criticism. Read book flaps and synopses. Read things you don’t like (often – it will break you out of a rut). Look up words you don’t understand in the dictionary. Join a reading group in your area. Read the New York Times book reviews.

Deconstruct the things you’re reading. Analyze the point of view. Why did they choose first person? Who is this all-knowing narrator who keeps popping in to make those annoying omniscient comments foreshadowing things to come? Can I trust this narrator? Keep track of plot and pacing. Make unseen connections. Buy the Cliff’s notes and actually do the homework lessons.

There is a solitary, quiet concentration required to finish a novel that mirrors the writing process itself. Good writers are, first and foremost, good readers – they understand the rubric of their genre, when breaking a rule is acceptable … and when it’s a grammatical mistake. A good writer understands the elements of great literature (even if they’re writing in the most restrictive of genres) and uses them accordingly.

And after you’re done reading for the day, go sit down in another solitary corner and write.