The Executioner's Song

The Executioner’s Song

By Norman Mailer

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1980

     No matter how you feel about the death penalty and its use in the United States, it is hard not to be moved by the story of Gary Gilmore. Gilmore, in 1977, became the first man to be executed since the death penalty had been reinstated. He had been released from prison just a few months prior to the crimes that he committed which got him sent to death row, and less than a year before he was ultimately executed by firing squad. Norman Mailer’s incredibly long detailed work stands as both a monument to the power of creative non-fiction as a means of both storytelling and documentation, as well as providing a frank appraisal of how certain personalities can affect change in the legal system.

     Gilmore, as a character, is not very likeable or trustworthy. If you don’t know what happens after he is released, reading The Executioner’s Song—especially the first half—could be initially tedious. If you are familiar with the case (and since most of the book hinges on something that happens about halfway through so if you want to be completely surprised stop reading now) Gilmore’s actions seem more troubling and, well, sad than tedious. Gilmore lies to others constantly, both for expedience, but also as a kind of tick when lying can serve no good possible purpose. He drinks, spends money extravagantly, and does not live up to his responsibilities. It is easy to dislike him. It is also easy to understand that at the age of 36 Gary was essentially a child who went from a rigid society with very permanent and obvious boundaries to a society where the boundaries were all intangible. Seeing how Gary responds to the outside world it is obvious that this will all come to a bad end.

     But Gary has good points too. He loves his family, even though he is not always honest with them. He looks for employment, even though his work ethic is sporadic and tends to peter out after the initial challenge of the position goes away. And, most significantly, he falls in love and has a relationship that above all else is rooted in an attempt by both parties to make the other happy. Okay, there is also physical and emotional abuse, and Gary does convince his girlfriend, a young woman named Nicole Baker, to attempt suicide.

     Gilmore’s ultimate failure to reconcile his desires with the demands of a society he does not understand leads tragically to the murder of a hotel employee and gas station attendant. Both men were married. Gilmore robbed the cash registers of these two establishments and came up with a fairly insignificant amount of cash.

     Mailer’s novel is, despite its length, a rather quick read. The first part of the novel deals with Gilmore’s release from prison and his failure to reintegrate into society. The second part of the novel deals with the trial and media circus that follows Gilmore’s decision to demand he be executed. I enjoyed the novel both for its simplicity in presentation of the facts, as well as the way Mailer is able to provide both suspense and emotional complexity to a rather difficult situation.

Coming soon: Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Possession

Possession

by A.S. Byatt

Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100

                This novel reminded me of a class I took where I looked at several drafts of a novel looking for little clues as to what order they were written in, using clues like the evolution of the text as well as letters between the author and his agent and then his editor. Whenever I describe what the project was in detail to friends of mine I often see their eyes glaze over and a polite expression cement itself on their face. Thank you for pretending to be interested, and you have no idea what you are missing.

                The novel begins with the discovery of a love letter written by Randolph Henry Ash to Christabel Lamotte by Roland Mitchell. Mitchell discovers the letter while looking at an old book owned by Ash in a museum. Mitchell is a frustrated literature scholar whose career has been stalled by his timidity which has been often translated as weakness. He steals the letter, not with the intention of using it to pursue fame, but instead he feels that since he found the letter, pursuing the meaning is his responsibility. He teams up with Lamotte scholar Maud Bailey, a professor at a small college, who is also a distant relative of Lamotte. The two work in secret, discovering letters, tracing the movements of the two poets over a century before, and reexamining poetry that has long been considered part of the British Cannon for new meaning now that a major--albeit secret-- part of both Ash and Lamotte's life being uncovered. It may sound predictable to say that the two researchers fall in love while they uncover the complexity of the Ash/Lamotte relationship, but that would be simplifying a plot element that is handled respectfully and with earnest complexity. The characters, even the characters that are long since dead, do not act like chess pieces to make a plot go (although the novel is intricately plotted), but are real working characters with well expressed thoughts and feelings.

                This may seem like a relatively dry plot, but it is terribly fascinating. Aside from the politics of academia, which provides a great deal of the tension of the novel, Mitchell's career woes  and the wear that a career that may be intellectually fulfilling but financially has left him a veritable pauper I found deeply stressful. There was also an interesting thread of resentment that runs through the novel that is directed at Americans. An aggressive Ash collector, whose monetary resources have cowed those of the British who identify him as a literary hero, is cast as the villain. Also cast in an antagonistic, if a little more ambiguous nature is a female American professor who has been working on a feminist study of Lamotte.  Byatt seems to be protesting Americans who have a sort of obsession with British culture that borders on fetishism.

                The novel unfolds like a really smart version of The DaVinci Code. Unfortunately, the cat and mouse aspect of Possession leads to a relatively disappointing conclusion that is not tonally in keeping with the rest of the novel. I read this book while I was looking for a house last year, and this is not as conducive as one might think to enjoying a book. Added to that, one aspect of the novel is, by design, sort of like homework. Byatt reconstructs the style of mid 19th Century British epic poetry with considerable skill. It reminded me (a little too well) of reading Alfred Lord Tennyson while studying for an exam, and that was a feeling I would have rather done without while trying to work out what sorts of concessions we wanted our seller to be making.

                There was a film adaptation of Possession made in 2002, which I have not seen. I am curious. Remember a little bit ago when I mentioned the feeling of resentment I got when discussing American scholars and collectors that was present in the novel? Roland Mitchell is played by Aaron Eckhart and Maud Baily is played by Gwyneth Paltrow, so I would assume that that is an aspect of the novel which did not survive to the film. From the trailer of the film, it does not appear that either actor attempts to hide their nationality. Added to this, the film is directed by Neil Labutte, a man who had until that point directed very intense and brutal movies about relationships and male aggression. Remember, I said I was curious. I did not say I was hopeful.

Coming soon: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer.

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1997

                

                This book was read almost exclusively on a hammock, which ups the enjoyment factor considerably.

                As the title suggests, this novel is about a man named Martin Dressler, an American with a dream. Dressler is the son of hard-working but unimaginative immigrants living in Manhattan in the 1880s. They own a struggling cigar shop, which Martin helps out in. Throughout the novel Martin's life becomes defined by a series of relatively bold moves. He begins arranging deliveries for his father's store, opens a franchise, gets a job as a hotel employee, saves enough to open a small cafeteria for lunch, and then begins to open new locations throughout Manhattan. He is young, he is driven, but there always seems to be something missing.

                At around this time he meets two sisters who live with their mother in his apartment building. He eats dinner with them every night, and befriends them. The two sisters are very different. Emmeline becomes his close friend and confidant. He senses that she is most impressed with the empire he is building. He eventually buys the hotel where he worked and begins to renovate it as a combination hotel/apartment space with shopping opportunities. This is a bold and innovative approach, and he gives Emmeline an important job at the hotel. It is Caroline, her younger sister that he decides to marry. Caroline is an enigmatic character. She is withholding, unimpressed by his achievements, and decides to marry him for the sole reason that he has asked her. As the novel progresses and Martin has success after success his marriage becomes more and more distant, and Martin is unable to enjoy his accomplishments.

                Again, I want to acknowledge the role that my hammock played in my enjoyment of this book. It is not as if I did not enjoy it, or find the themes interesting. It was just such an odd book. The character of Martin was described the same way a distant protagonist in a biography would be described. Until the last chapter where there was no escape from the rather heavy symbolism, I was hard pressed to remember that I was reading a work of fiction. He is driven by something undefined, something that Steven Milhauser seems to be suggesting is distinctly American. The problem, according to Milhauser, is that drive to achieve does not necessarily lead to fulfillment but only a different kind of indefinable emptiness. He is never satisfied by his achievements, but always asking "What's next?" and moving on to another project. The relationship that Martin has with his wife is part of this. He chooses a spouse who will not be an equal, but will in fact always be an unobtainable absence. I know I expected him to fall in love with Emmeline and be happy with her, but this is not how the story turns out.

                There are definitely things I liked about this book. The faux-biographical format--despite the way it made Martin's actions seem mysterious--made for a quick read. The time period was an interesting choice as well. There was something very Horatio Alger/rags-to-riches about putting this story in late 1800s New York. It was also interesting how Milhauser described the businesses that Martin opened. They were filled with imagery of Americana, suggesting that part of his appeal as a businessman was a sort of manipulation of imagery. I don't know if the connection between these images and the ultimate failure of the internal (and again, as Milhauser would describe as distinctly American) drive to create something larger is as apparent as it could have been, but I thought they were effective. 

Coming soon: Possession by A.S. Byatt.

Independence Day

Independence Day

by Richard Ford

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1996

       Richard Ford's sequel to The Sportswriter picks up Frank Bascombe's life about five years later. Whenever a writer takes on a sequel as opposed to creating a completely new world and characters to inhabit it, I have to wonder what the writer is trying to say, or if the writer felt like the first story was not complete.  An obvious question about a book like this is: Do I have to read the first one to understand this? In this case, the answer is no. There are references to the events of the first novel, but those references are vague and not necessary to understand the events of this novel. What remains constant is the sort of lazy way that the plot unfolds.

       In this novel it is Independence Day weekend, 1988. A substantial amount of time is dedicated to the discussion of the upcoming Bush/Dukakis showdown, a decision that apparently was supposed to reveal characters' core values. Considering how that particular election was sort of a blowout, and Frank is decidedly in the Dukakis column, I have to wonder what Ford's view of America is. Frank has left sports reporting behind, and has moved on to become a real estate agent. Having just purchased a house, I have to say I would not have wanted Frank as my agent, and I don't know where he finds clients like the ones he deals with, but suffice to say the sequences that show Frank at work were rather stressful. I am going to do some rather extemporaneous analysis of Frank's career switch, like jazz. A home is a metaphor for a life, and Frank is acting as an agent of transition and redefinition...much like the American Declaration of Independence.
          Frank is, again, deeply into a relationship that seems like it could go one way or another. This time he is seeing a woman who used to be married to a classmate of his who went crazy in Vietnam and abandoned her upon returning to the US. After a decade has passed she is with Frank and contemplating redefining herself as the former Mrs. So and So and become the new Mrs. Frank Bascombe. Frank would like to become the new husband of this woman, while at the same time he can't let go of his old wife. Here she has a name. Ann. Not X. It is a wonderful promotion. Ann is remarried now, and has moved away from the small town where they lived as a couple and spent the first few years of their divorce. Frank is not completely ready to let go. He has purchased her old home, and is living in it, an obvious signal to the reader that in order to give his new relationship a chance, he has some work to do. And again, we look at that jazzy ole metaphor for the home as a life.

      Oh, and their surviving son, Paul, has apparently lost his marbles. Frank has decided to take Paul on a trip to the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame for some father/son time, but just prior to this Paul has attacked his new stepfather with an oar, stolen the family car, and wrecked it. Their time together seems to be what the action of the novel will deal with, but Richard Ford is, again, glacially slow here, and the novel is well into the second half before the two characters get together. Which was fine with me. Paul was among the more annoying characters I've read in awhile. I wouldn't go so far as say he was literary birth control, but he was hardly sympathetic.

      I do not have wonderful things to say about this book. It was exceedingly competent, and had some very moving and poignant moments, but was in some ways rather exhausting. While I admire Richard Ford's extreme attention to the train of thought of Frank Bascombe, the thematic elements of the novel were not very subtle. I mentioned when I wrote up The Sportswriter that these books make up a trilogy. The third book was not listed as a Time top 100, nor is it a Pulitzer winner so I don't have to read it to cross it off my list. That doesn't mean I'll never read it, but without making myself duty-bound I don't know if I will ever be tempted. The only thing that I think would push me to read it is the fact that I have read the first two books, and I hate leaving things off lists of any sort uncrossed. Yeah, I probably will read it. 

Coming soon:  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser.

The Sportswriter

The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100

                Frank Bascombe, the central character of The Sportswriter, is a difficult individual to pin down.  He is an individual who seems to care very deeply about the people in his life, but is also extremely self-centered. I guess it is in that conflict of self that the novel finds the bulk of the tension. It certainly isn't the plot, which meanders from point A to point B at a glacial pace.  

                The novel opens with Bascombe, at the start of Easter weekend, meeting his ex-wife at the grave of their dead son...whose grave is right next to Bascombe's backyard. Clearly, we as readers are being set up. We are beginning with a past that did not work, filled with pain, and a future that begins with rebirth on Easter. And, yes, that is kind of what happens. Here is the plan. Bascombe wants to leave the graveyard, pick up his girlfriend to go on a romantic (sort of) trip to Detroit, come back, and have a nice meal with his girlfriend's family. And for the most part, that is exactly how this goes down. But, because we open at a graveyard we have to deal with the past. I expected that most of the flashbacks would deal with Bascombe's relationship with his son, but instead the focus of the flashbacks is mostly on career and relationship choices. Initially, it turned out, Bascombe had wanted to be a novelist. He had written a highly regarded book of short fiction, had gotten married and moved to a quiet community where he was treated like a rising star in the literary world before he decided to abandon his novel and write for a sports magazine. The expectation of a reader would be that Bascombe would look back on this as a mistake, that writing for the magazine would seem like taking the path of least resistance, and he would look back at that choice as a compromise. But for the most part he is completely satisfied with his career. He also talks about his marriage to a woman who is referred to in this novel only as "X." His marriage to X seems to be a happy one from what Bascombe chooses to reveal. However, after the death of their oldest son, he engages in a series of affairs and the marriage unravels. Again, this is not something that Bascombe treats with any real sense of regret, or, maybe more accurately he does not take the blame. 

                There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that he is a callous character, and sometimes I definitely opted for this interpretation. Another, is that he is living in the moment, and that while he is aware of his past, he is trying to move forward. Neither interpretation makes him a likeable character. Indeed, there are many times throughout the course of the novel that I thought he was kind of a scumbag. But as he goes about his Easter weekend it is hard not to root for him to make choices that will make his life better, or at the very least make him feel more fulfilled. The story does throw some curveballs at Frank. A member of a divorced men's group confides in him that he has just had a homosexual encounter after his wife left him. An interview subject that Frank was supposed to be writing an article about turns out to be mentally unhinged. Frank's doctor, who he personally despises, may be having an affair with X.

                I did not enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. Frank Bascombe is an interesting character, but I had a really hard time identifying with him when he talked about how he dealt with bad things in his life. And the novel is so in his head, that if you aren't sold on him as a character, you will not find reading the book a rewarding experience. This is actually the first book in a trilogy. The second book, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer for 1996. That will be the next book I write up. I think it is telling that I do not have a burning interest to read the third book. It was announced in 2007 that HBO would turn the three novels into a 6-part miniseries, and it would be directed by James Mangold. That was 2007, so I am assuming that the project fell apart.

                                                         

Coming soon: Independence Day by Richard Ford.

The Known World

The Known World

by Edward P. Jones

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2004

As powerful as this novel was, I have to say it had one idea repeated over and over in episodes that ranged from being quietly tragic to kind of staggering. Not that this idea is an unimportant one, and if I were to pick up a book and it contained only the three words "Slavery is bad," I probably would have thought that the book lacked a punch. But there it is. Edward P. Jones created a living community on the page, with characters that are fully developed and living, and has them all play out a story that seems to underline the fairly obvious message that slavery is bad.

The novel deals with a family of slaves who through difficulty and sacrifice manage to buy their freedom from a master who believes in slavery as an institution. However, the young man who is purchased into freedom last has spent a good amount of time as his white master's footman, and has now a rather warped impression of what slavery is. This is apparent when he turns around and begins purchasing slaves himself. In another plotline there is a young married couple who are abolitionists who are given, as a wedding gift from a passive aggressive slave owning cousin, a young slave girl. The couple decide against freeing the girl, but instead raise her as a daughter--with disastrous results. These storylines, and others are weaved together expertly. I will say that the climax of the novel feels like a pulled punch compared with other moments, but Jones is able to let us know how the unnatural state of slavery is, well, bad.

I think it is probably fair to put this novel in direct comparison to other novels about a similar subject. Toni Morrison's Beloved deals with slavery as an institution and as a wound that continues to hurt everyone who was affected by it. The Known World is a good compliment to this idea. While not as strong a work as Beloved, it does remind the readers that slavery really was not so long ago, and the affects of slavery are still felt. Jones will trace the descendants of some of his characters all the way to contemporary times in a way that is interesting, and even mildly accusatory. 

I enjoyed this book, but it wasn't my favorite. I would suggest it to people who are interested in history, and historical stories that are not often told. There is also a local feel to the novel (I am located in Richmond VA), and the story takes place in and around where I live and work. I guess people who live in Manhattan probably experience this feeling quite a bit.

Coming soon: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford