Domus Aurea

Gosh, The Golden House turned out to be a great book! I liked it fine from the start, but I think I was expecting it to be a particular kind of story: the sort of New Yorker-ish family drama that turns an unflinching eye on painful relationships. It evolves, though, and turns into an astonishing, urgent, almost revelatory tale. It's very tempting to read it as a commentary on our present moment, and there's ample content within the text to support that, but it also swings towards an almost Philip Roth-ish project of using a hyper-local neighborhood to reveal something profound about America.

I think this kind of effort almost requires a certain amount of distance, some degree of outsider-ness, being surrounded by America while remaining aware of its perplexities. Roth got this by growing up Jewish, Rushdie gets it by immigrating as an adult. Where Roth infamously self-inserts, Rushdie's presence is more diffused and interesting. The narrator René is ethnically Belgian but was born into the Manhattan enclave The Gardens, living the majority of his entire rich life on a few city blocks. He is a filmmaker rather than a novelist, tends towards timidity, and other than his politics I suspect he shares little with the author. The novel is more focused on the Golden clan, who share Rushdie's Indian ancestry but are even further apart from (what I know of) his personality. Incredibly wealthy, infamous, connected, and dramatic, they are completely compelling and mysterious. It's remarkable just how quickly they are absorbed into this particular neighborhood, which in turn shifts slightly to accommodate them. We're constantly reminded that everyone here came from somewhere else, whether that's Italy or Africa or Myanmar or the subcontinent.

While reading this book, I eventually realized that this was the one I heard Salman Rushdie speak about last year at City Arts & Lecture. I've forgotten a lot of that evening, except for the crazy dude who bum-rushed the stage, but do remember that he spent a fair amount of time talking about the 2016 election and his perspective on it while living in New York City. He had a sinking premonition about the outcome in the weeks running up to it, partly due to an unnerving experience he had with a Sikh cabdriver who proved to be an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump. Rushdie, nonplussed, asked why the Sikh would support a man so vocally opposed to him and his culture, only to find that it was this very fact that made Trump so appealing: "Donald Trump, a straight shooter! Says what he means!" American politics has long prized style over substance, but for Rushdie it was a sign that substance had been completely abandoned, and elections would turn solely on a candidate's ability to entertain.

He also recalled his frustration when, weeks later, he joined in an Inauguration Day protest outside of Trump Tower. At first he admired the enthusiasm and vigor of the young twenty-something protestors, but when he began speaking with them he realized that not a single one of them had voted in the November election. This infuriated him, and his anger was still palpable a year later on the San Francisco stage. Especially for someone who grew up in a country that had won independence, then lost democracy during the "Emergency", suffered political assassination, and saw nations around the world experience coups and dictatorships. He eloquently and fervently spoke in defense of democracy, not a luxury that we can choose to admire when it suits us, but a hard-won advancement of the human race that must be diligently defended and exercised. Those of us who have never seriously faced the threat of a totalitarian regime are at far greater risk of discarding our freedoms than someone who has seen the alternative first-hand.

MINI SPOILERS

So, with all of those memories fresh in my mind, of course I was thinking a lot about the election and Trump while reading the book. And with good reason: the action begins shortly after Obama's first election, with René recalling the giddy disbelief of victory in 2008. The novel isn't primarily about politics, but as in real life those events provide much of the backdrop, and we mark time as the years go by and the turn draws closer.

Early on I thought that the patriarch, Nero Golden, was intended as a stand-in for Trump. It's especially easy to think this given the cadence of his speech, as in this utterance at one of his first parties.

I think he was using his immense capacity for bravado to stave off the inevitable. "I'm a man of reason," he informed his dinner guests on the night of Petya's meltdown. (He had a weakness for self-praising orations.) "A man of affairs. If I may say so, a great man of affairs. Believe me. Nobody knows affairs better than I do, let me tell you that."
- p. 52

On paper, there are a lot of linkages there. Both men are elderly real estate developers, with a vast array of projects across New York City and beyond. Both have ties to shady financiers and mob-affiliated associates. Golden starts out much more subtle than Trump, but after a few years in America he also yearns to have his name emblazoned in bold letters on the side of the tallest and most prestigious buildings in Manhattan. Both have a weakness for Eastern European women. Both have children from multiple marriages. Both are deeply secular, looking to the dollar as the most real and tangible marker of worth and value. Both have hazy and shallow political ideologies that started in a somewhat cosmopolitan consensus, then grew increasingly reactionary and paranoid as they devoured Fox News during the Obama presidency, and eventually coalesced into a malign misanthropy.

And yet, by the end, I'm almost completely convinced that Nero isn't intended as an analogue to Trump. The end of the book deals a lot with identity, both its importance in itself and its importance in its current perception, and the identity of a Bronx-born "billionaire" and the identity of an Indian émigré are worlds apart. Nero is certainly not a good man, but we come to learn his origins, his dreams, the rational steps that brought him to his present station. I hesitate to call him sympathetic, but I'm sure that Rushdie has far more affection for Nero than he does for Trump.

And his children are far more sympathetic than the Trump clan. Not only that, they're a lot more interesting than the wooden, hollow figures we see on television. Nero is the animating force that drives the plot, but I find myself thinking most of the three sons. Serious, brilliant, damaged Petya, who begins as a fragile manchild and devolves into a dark and obsessive incel. The outgoing, flamboyant, worldly Apu, who dons an ill-deserved political mantle and wears it convincingly for years, caring deeply about whatever he faces at the moment, then leaving it behind. And the tragic, compelling, questioning D, who just wants to be and not to become.

So, the Goldens are almost certainly not the Trumps. That said, Rushdie does, once the time come, face Trump head on, and, hoo boy, it is amazing and terrifying. I'm so grateful for the novelist's gift, to make us notice and care about the ordinary things we see each day. Living in the Upside-Down for the last two years, it can be hard to remember that this is not normal, that things used to be different. Rushdie's creative, imaginative, evocative treatment of the campaign crashes through the numb memories we hold and makes the outrage of 2016 fresh again. Apologies for the very long passage quoted here, but this is so ridiculously good that I couldn't help myself.

    To step outside that enchanted - and now tragic - cocoon was to discover that America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe; D.C., Suchitra said, was under attack by DC. It was the year of the Joker in Gotham and beyond. The Caped Crusader was nowhere to be seen - it was not an age of heroes - but his archrival in the purple frocked coat and striped pantaloons was ubiquitous, clearly delighted to have the stage to himself and hogging the limelight with evident delight. He had seen off the Suicide Squad, his feeble competition, but he permitted a few of his inferiors to think of themselves as future members of a Joker administration. The Penguin, the Riddler, Two-Face and Poison Ivy lined up behind the Joker in packed arenas, swaying like doo-wop backing singers while their leader spoke of the unrivaled beauty of white skin and red lips to adoring audiences wearing green fright wigs and chanting in unison, Ha! Ha! Ha!
    The origins of the Joker were disputed, the man himself seemed to enjoy allowing contradictory versions to fight for air space, but on one fact everyone, passionate supporters and bitter antagonists, was agreed: he was utterly and certifiably insane. What was astonishing, what made this an election year like no other, was that people backed him because he was insane, not in spite of it. What would have disqualified any other candidate made him his followers' hero. Sikh taxi drivers and rodeo cowboys, rabid alt-right blondes and black brain surgeons agreed, we love his craziness, no milquetoast euphemisms from him, he shoots straight from the hip, says whatever he fucking wants to say, robs whatever bank he's in the mood to rob, kills whoever he feels like killing, he's our guy. The black bat-knight has flown! It's a new day, and it's going to be a scream! All hail the United States of Joker! U.S.J! U.S.J.! U.S.J.!
    It was a year of two bubbles. In one of those bubbles, the Joker shrieked and the laugh-track crowds laughed right on cue. In that bubble the climate was not changing and the end of the Arctic icecap was just a new real estate opportunity. In that bubble, gun murderers were exercising their constitutional rights but the parents of murdered children were un-American. In that bubble, if its inhabitants were victorious, the president of the neighboring country to the south which was sending rapists and killers to America would be forced to pay for a wall dividing the two nations to keep the killers and rapists south of the border where they belonged; and the country's enemies would be defeated instantly and overwhelmingly; and mass deportations would be a good thing; and women reporters would be seen to be unreliable because they had blood coming out of their whatevers; and the parents of dead war heroes would be revealed to be working for radical Islam; and international treaties would not have to be honored; and Russia would be a friend and that would have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russian oligarchs propping up the Joker's shady enterprises; and the meanings of things would change; multiple bankruptcies would be understood to prove great business expertise; and three and a half thousand lawsuits against you would be understood to prove business acumen; and stiffing your contractors would prove your tough-guy business attitude; and a crooked university would prove your commitment to education; and while the Second Amendment would be sacred the First would not be; so those who criticized the leader would suffer consequences; and African Americans would go along with it all because what the hell did they have to lose. In that bubble knowledge was ignorance, up was down, and the right person to hold the nuclear codes in his hand was the green-haired white-skinned red-slash-mouthed giggler who asked a military briefing team four times why using nuclear weapons was so bad. In that bubble, razor-tipped playing cards were funny, and wishing you could have sex with your daughter was funny, and sarcasm was funny even when what was called sarcasm was not sarcastic, and lying was funny, and hatred was funny, and bigotry was funny, and bullying was funny, and the date was, or almost was, or might soon be, if the jokes worked out as they should, nineteen eighty-four.
    [...] In Gotham we knew who the Joker was, and wanted nothing to do with him, or the daughter he lusted after, or the daughter he never mentioned, or the sons who murdered elephants and leopards for sport. "I'll take Manhattan!" the Joker screeched, hanging from the top of a skyscraper, but we laughed at him and not at his bombastic jokery, and he had to take his act on the road to places where people hadn't gotten his number yet, or, worse, knew very well what he was and loved him for it: the segment of the country that was as crazy as he. His people. Too many of them for comfort.
    It was the year of the great battle between deranged fantasy and gray reality, between, on the one hand, la chose en soi, the possibly unknowable but probably existing thing in itself, the world as it was independently of what was said about it or how it was seen, the Ding an sich, to use the Kantian term - and, on the other, the cartoon character who had crossed the line between the page and the stage - a sort of illegal immigrant, I thought - whose plan was to turn the whole country, faux-hilariously, into a lurid graphic novel[...] a comic book in which elections were rigged and the media were crooked and everything you hated was a conspiracy against you, but in the end! Yay! You won, the fright wig turned into a crown, and the Joker became the King.
- p. 248-250

Isn't that something?! I'm kind of reminded of the amazing passage about the Widow in Midnight's Children, which is similarly poetic and vivid, with a compelling cadence and rhythm that draws you into the awfulness while illuminating it.

As a side note, I was brought up short by the toss-away phrase "the black bat-knight" in the above, which is intriguing if you think about it relating to Obama. It isn't a fully-developed thesis, but is still cool: Obama and Batman are similarly reserved, intelligent, responsible, and viewed by their enemies with respect and fear. Joker and Trump are, as developed at length above, unpredictable, nihilistic, selfish, cruel, and unreliable. Sigh.

I kind of like the idea that 37 years have passed between Midnight's Children and The Golden House, and in that time Salman Rushdie has moved from Marvel Comics to DC Comics. My memory of Midnight's Children is a bit hazy, but I remember the Children as being a quintessentially Marvel-esque collection of heroes, a sort of Indian X-Men who cheerfully team up to face their deadly foes. The Golden House is the darker, less humorous world of DC, and must grapple with the institutional heroes of its universe rather than growing its own.

This observation has been made many times before, but comics seem to have fully supplanted biblical and classical literature as a common cultural touchstone for a society. A hundred years ago, people of culture who had attended university would recognize the Greek or Roman names in a book and had some premonition of what those characters would do, or smile when they recognized a scene from the Old Testament played out in a modern setting. We're now a much more diverse and secular society, so those biblical allusions would go unrecognized in a post-Faulkner world; and the classics are boring and problematic, so fewer people know less of those stories. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just that it's a transition which has been well under way for a while, which is part of why it's so interesting that The Golden House straddles the old and the new: it opens filled to the brim with classical references, Apollo and Dionysus and Rome and Nero. It's a powerful world, a wealthy world, but one that doesn't quite fit in modern America. Its value diminishes, and we segue into the new argot, the language of film and comics, the new mythology that every American is expected to know.

Everyone knows that Stan Lee has defined a common language for us, but Rushdie knows far more, and I was struck again and again by just how plugged into the zeitgeist he is. The man is a septuagenarian, and yet he writes with authority and conviction about ideas that I'm used to finding in the corners of tumblr. I was mildly shocked when Gamergate entered the story: not just a tossed-off topical reference, but conveying the horror and the vileness of that putrid misogynistic mob. Petya's aloofness in the face of this existential threat damns my perception of him more than almost any other action could have. Or there's the discussion of TERFs, which I doubt the vast majority of Americans have heard but consumes many online communities. Here, too, Rushdie shows that he knows what he's talking about, and it compellingly illuminates a character, in this case the seeking D.

I thought D's story was especially interesting and sad. I was surprised by the directions it moved in, much as Riya must have been. I absolutely love how Rushdie sticks the landing here, which does a great job at articulating some of my own thoughts around identity and labels and dogma.

The truth is that our identities are unclear to us and maybe it's better that they remain that way, that the self goes on being a jumble and a mess, contradictory and irreconcilable. [...] That should be all right. Flexibility should be all right. Love should dominate, not dogmas of the self.
- p. 297

There's enormous pressure to pick a side, to declare what you are, to claim your team and then fight for it. I'm fine with that in sports, and in politics, which are fundamentally about cooperating with a group of people to accomplish goals. But we're being asked to do that in our souls as well, to filter out the stew inside and turn it into a bisque. It should be okay just to be. What happens in an individual's body and heart should belong to them, not be held up to the world, whether for affirmation or ridicule.

MEGA SPOILERS

There's a lot of sadness in this book, but it's a good kind of sadness, which acknowledges the real pain and loss in the world, and also reminds you that it isn't the only thing in the world. Near the end René grapples, as we all have, with the new world in which he finds himself, and discovers that he's lived here for years without realizing it.

Sometimes the bad guys win and what does one do when the world one believes in turns out to be a paper moon and a dark planet rises and says, No, I am the world. How does one live amongst one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don't know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can't tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D. C., to be born.
- p. 359

What's the path forward? We can create comfort for ourselves, in our lives, in our personal relations. And we can build on that to make connections and movements and try to roll back the tide.

It had been more than a year since the Joker's conquest of American and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you. There was only the holding of hands and slowly learning not to be afraid of the dark.
- p. 365

END SPOILERS

There's, uh, a lot of politics in this post, which is a bit misleading. Politics has been very much on my mind, in life and in art, and that aspect resonated very strongly with me, but this novel is getting at something deeper and more important. Politics is ultimately people working together and making decisions, and The Golden House is at its most beautiful when it looks at individual people making their own decisions and seeing how those ripple through a community.

I liked this book a lot. It's definitely shot up to be at least my second-favorite Rushdie novel, and by the end I was pretty sure it had dethroned Midnight's Children. It can be a hard book, and I'm not sure if I'll want to revisit it any time soon, but these characters will linger in my memory for a very, very long time.

Inside, Outside

Salman Rushdie's East, West is the first chance I've had to read his short stories. I'd previously been thoroughly impressed with Midnight's Children, a phenomenal phantasmagoric expedition into events and thoughts around the time of India's early statehood.

Rushdie is an interesting guy, and arguably one of the most global citizens in a world full of continent-hopping writers. He's a product of the British legacy in India, and seems to have spent much of his life and his career exploring that intersection. East, West is an explicit journey through these two spheres, looking at each one individually and at how they intersect.

The first section, "East," collects a handful of stories set in India. These are the shortest in the book, and also seem like the simplest: the plots are fairly straightforward, the narration is conventional. They're still affecting, though, like something from Saki. One story features an old man who hangs around outside the British Embassy in India, scamming people into giving him money to help grease the wheels for their visa applications. He falls for a visiting woman, honestly tells her what she's up against and offers to give her a rare fake document that will let her go to England and visit her fiance. She thanks him kindly, refuses the offer, and serenely goes off to apply. When she returns, she's so happy that the old man believes she's done the impossible and navigated the bureaucratic hurdles on her own. She explains that, no, she failed to give them satisfactory answers, and her application was denied. Then why, the old man asks, is she so happy? Because since she has tried and failed, now she can live her life: she'll remain focused on her family and her friends here on the subcontinent, instead of thinking about a young man who she barely knows who lives half a world away.

I can't exactly sum up the moral of the story, but it definitely feels like a story with a moral, right?

The second section, "West," features stories that seem to be set in America or England. These are a bit longer and more intricate, and a little more fanciful as well. ("East" stories are either realistic or have straight-up magic, while "West" has a bit more of that dreamlike quality that people like me enjoy so much.) One of the most interesting in this section is "The Auction of the Ruby Slippers," which describes the excitement around an upcoming chance to bid on Dorothy's slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The story is, well, short, but there's an incredible amount going on: the auction itself and the fanatical devotion it attracts would be interesting enough, but Rushdie has set this story in the foreground of some sort of mass social breakdown. The narrator barely alludes to it, in the same way that we usually wouldn't bring up the sky being blue when we're telling a story, but enough offhand references slip in that they kind of jar us a bit, and give a nicely unsettling feeling to the whole tale.

The final section, "East, West" is a kind of synthesis that brings together the hemispheres. Sometimes this is done explicitly, like in "Chekhov and Zulu," which describes the adventures of two Sikhs trying to navigate the political landscape in the wake of Indira Gandhi's assassination. We eventually learn that "Zulu" should actually be called "Sulu," and that the two of them are childhood friends who were devoted to "Star Trek" (which they had never actually seen, but just absorbed through the detritus of Western culture that washed ashore on India), and use that show's metaphors to describe everything important in their lives. Also in this vein, "The Courter" is a great, fairly traditionally told story of an Indian family that has emigrated to London and their experiences there.

Other times, "East, West" doesn't directly talk about India and the west, but rather seems to be trying for a kind of synthesis of different ways of thinking or seeing the world. One of my favorite stories here was "The Harmony of the Spheres," which describes the friendship between two men, one of whom has slipped into paranoid schizophrenia after a lifetime devoted to studying the occult. It's a fascinating and disturbing story that doesn't directly have anything to do with East or West but a lot to do about exploration, ideas, and synthesis.

I'm pretty impressed by what I've read here. It's hard to sum up Rushdie's short fiction, but if forced to do so, I'd probably compare him to Nabokov. Not in the direct sense of sounding like him, but in the way both of them show great skill at playing around with different voices and narrations, and the way both of them take inspiration from the immigrant experience without ever sounding like immigrant writers. It's been great to see Rushdie back on the literary map for the past decade, and I hope we get to see many more stories from him.

Books! We got books!

I have recently returned from a wonderful weeklong vacation with my family to upstate Minnesota. During this time, I was reminded about how incredibly fortunate I am to have grown up among these folks. If you dropped in at random during the week, odds are high that you would have found at least half of us stretched out reading our books. Now, reading isn't the only thing we do - we had a blast by the lake, went on a long bike ride, explored the nearby small town, spent hours talking and catching up, even participating in a remarkably democratic kitchen. Still, there's no escaping the fact that this is a scholarly family that loves words and learning, and I owe them for any success I've found in life.

This relaxing and serene environment meant that, rather than squeezing in a chapter between a busy workday and necessary sleep, I was able to devote hours to catching up on things I'd been meaning to read. I brought along two books that have thwarted me in the past: Gravity's Rainbow and Midnight's Children. I never did get around to the first (one of these days, Pynchon! One of these days!), but the long stretches available for reading allowed me to conquer Rushdie's aggressively obtuse prose. It was well worth it.

I've been meaning to read Rushdie for a while now. I think it's the contrarian attitude I take towards censorship, and no modern author has been so famously censored as him. Beyond that, though, he was always at the periphery of my modern English lit classes, and several people I respect have spoken highly of his writing in general and this book in particular.

But the language... ah, the language! Now, I am the last person to complain about an author's adherence to the strictures of the English language. I still think that Ulysses is the most amazing book I've ever read, largely because of the phenomenal way Joyce manipulates the language. That said, I fully accept that I never would have finished Ulysses if the book hadn't been required reading for a college course. The combination of external pressure to push through the reading, along with access to resources and insights from my classmates, turned a solitary chore into a collective joy.

Outside the framework of a seminar, I had to motivate myself to get through this book, and it was tough.... I have to admit that up until around page 250 I didn't like the book. I'll get to the narrator in a moment, but even apart from the character of the narrator, the way he expresses himself is an active challenge. He slings together nouns and verbs in series without any connections or punctuation; his sentences run on; he fills expository passages with authorial interjections; and, perhaps most frustrating to me, he uses dialect throughout the novel. Now, I respect Rushdie the author's choice to use these techniques, but it does mean I need to work much harder to understand what the heck is happening, and only recoup some of that effort in better storytelling.

Besides speaking in a scattershot voice, the narrator may be the least reliable I've read. Now, this part I didn't mind so much, and by the end of the novel, it was actually pretty fun. He forgets what he's saying, realizes that events couldn't have happened in the year he described, suggests that he has been exagerrating or diminishing characters to conform to his prejudices, even admits towards the end that he lied about certain things. As long as you view the whole thing as a yarn, it's all in good fun. Now, the narrator is speaking to the reader, but within the text, he is also describing these things to Padma (I think that's her name...), a young woman. He describes how he carefully watches her to see how she reacts... if her face shows she doubts him, he will backpedal and try to convince her; if she is engaged in the story, he will rush onward, spinning out more for her.

MINI SPOILERS

The narrator is, really, a cad. He doesn't like himself all that much, even if he does have an inflated opinion of his importance, so I don't feel bad making that judgement. His failures in life seem of a piece with his failures as a writer.

That said, I don't particularly enjoy reading about mediocre, miserable people. So I only started perking up once the book began delving into the more mystical aspects of the story: the special powers held by the Midnight Children. Even though these proved to ultimately be a bit of a red herring, the mere introduction of the supernatural gave the book a charge it was missing. I feel like the start of the book (which begins, excruciatingly, with his grandfather, many decades before the narrator's birth) was trying to get by on portent and clever writing. After Saleem appears on the scene, and even more once he reaches adolesence, the book turns much more into a story... there's meaningful action there, not just words.

Again, the turning point for me came when Saleem snorts a drawstring and becomes telepathic. I fell in love with the book when he describes the nightmare he has of the Widow's hand. It was this passage that convinced me that his prose wasn't an obstacle, wasn't just necessary for this character, but actually could contribute wonderful writing that is impossible in standard proper English. The nightmare contains all the things I complained about before - run-on sentences, stacked unlinked words, etc. - but they transformed the piece and made it a living nightmare that actually frightened me, even as I was sitting on a sunny porch near a beautiful lake. Here's an excerpt:

The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's hair has a centre parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow's arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow's arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow's hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on the walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars the widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black.

Isn't that AMAZING?

The only comparable thing I can think of is the poem Fear by my favorite poet, W. S. Merwin. And that's really special. At his peak, Rushdie is crossing the ancient boundary between poetry and prose. Not content to waste words on merely telling a story, he elevates the language above the story, calling attention to it, playing with it, and making this ultimately a story about words and storytelling.

By the end of the novel, I was very impressed with it as a whole. Rushdie has truly created a unique voice here, and I can understand why this book made his reputation.

END OF MINI SPOILERS

The other major catch-up I made over vacation was The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Saunders is my favorite active short story writer, but this is a collection of his essays. I was delighted to find that his essays are just as trenchant, funny, and observant as his fiction. Not only that, they can be just as subversive, creative, and beautiful. He has a wonderful essay on Britain in there, based on several pieces he wrote for The Guardian, and you have to approach it the same way you would approach one of his short stories... it is non-fiction, nominally, but non-fiction with the tongue so firmly planted in cheek that it might as well be fiction. (I think I'm leading off with this essay because it seems of a piece with the Midnight's Children observation above... you need to have a clear understanding of the difference between Saunders, the author, and Saunders, the narrator, to "get" what these pieces are doing.)

The title piece, The Braindead Megaphone, is arguably the most important piece. It is a thoughtful and damning indictment of the present state of the media in the United States, and how our relationship with it has warped the national psyche. I previously agreed with pretty much everything in this essay, but don't think I'd ever previously heard it said so eloquently.

He's also a very accomplished travel writer. His pieces on Dubai were fascinating, both for their early insight (he published these pieces before Dubai became a common topic here), and also for their musings on the role of culture and the future of nationalism. Some of his conclusions reminded me of Neal Stephenson's Disneyland tangent in In The Beginning... was the Command Line. Near the end of the book he visits the Buddha Boy, and along the way experiences the wretched life lived in Nepal. In between he spends more time in Texas than I ever will as he explores the border between the U. S. and Mexico. That piece may be the most interesting of the trio, as he spends time with the Minutemen (many of whom actually sound like nice people) and grapples with the implications of "the immigration issue."

Gosh, I really can't describe every chapter in here... it's all solid stuff. In terms of theme: he also has a few pieces about writing, all of which are excellent. One is semi-autobiographical, discussing "Johnny Tremain", the first good book that he'd read, and how it opened his mind to what good writing meant. The evolution continues with an appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut, who turned him from being a mediocre writer trying to channel Hemingway into who he is today. Finally, he offers one of the most concise and insightful evaluations of Huckleberry Finn that I've seen.

This also collects some of the great "Shouts & Murmurs" pieces that he's done for the New Yorker. If you missed them the first time around, you'll be heartily amused; otherwise, you'll enjoy seeing them again.

It's good to know that Saunders is a man of many talents. He's shown that he can write amazing short stories, great columns, and beautiful essays. Now he just needs to write a full novel, and we'll be set!