THE SECOND COMING – Walker Percy

I’m thinking now I should have re-read Walker Percy’s six novels in the order they appeared, and I’m trying to understand why I chose to do it randomly. It’s just occurred to me I might have started the re-reads the way I started the first-reads---at least at first. The Moviegoer appeared first, and I read it first and have no recollection what drew me to it. I’ve since read it twice more, most recently three years ago before I decided to read the other five again, as well. I recall that years after reading Moviegoer a reporter colleague at the newspaper that employed us recommended either The Last Gentleman or The Second Coming, and I read the one she suggested, which hooked me so thoroughly I then read the others on my own, as well as articles and interviews and Percy’s nonfiction books.

 

This time around my Percy reading hopped to and fro until I came to the two my colleague recommended decades ago. I chose The Second Coming because at this point I remembered enough of it to know it was my favorite of them all, despite the fact it’s the sequel to The Last Gentleman, which I intend to read next, and finally, one more time, The Moviegoer.

There. That said (I hate that expression), I remembered liking Coming best because of the protagonist’s quirky romance with a young woman he discovers while hunting an errant golf ball in a woods near his home and abutting the golf course. I almost wrote “literally stumbles upon” because he’d been falling down of late, and possibly had fallen again in the woods moments before he finds her living in an abandoned greenhouse there. I don’t remember all of the falling down episodes other than that most of them occur on or near the golf course. He’s approaching middle age and experiencing the existential (psychological and philosophical) torments characteristic of Percy’s male characters, and the young woman has escaped from a mental hospital.

The Second Coming was described in a Christian Science Monitor review as “a comedy shot through with serious observations.” That’s a fine description, which I could have paraphrased without crediting its author, Elizabeth Muther, but I wanted an excuse to link you to her review, which is better than anything I might write here. (It’s not that I’m humble, just...well, I think it’s dumb to try to reinvent wheels that have been around thirty-seven years by people who invent such things for a living. So I won’t do a plot synopsis or a philosophical analysis of Coming or rave about Percy’s cleverly satiric approach to his favorite theme: the search for meaning in a social culture that stifles individual awakening in a hothouse atmosphere of stale routine and expectations, other than to note that his caricatures of moneyed Southern archetypes are either dead-on or seem so because he’s such a damned good writer and the only vivid exposure I’ve had to moneyed Southern archetypes is from his damned good writing—even though I’ve lived in Virginia for nearly half a century.)

That said (Jesus, I hate that expression!), what drew me to Coming this time was the recollection of the romance between the falling-miserable-moneyed-slowly-going-nuts protagonist (with whom I identified—as always) and the nubile-amnesiac-slowly-exhibiting-sanity greenhouse dweller who hits it off with him (me). I’m discovering more and more that my long-held notion of being an encrusted, oh-yeah cynical newsman was something of a sham and am trying to hang onto at least some of that protective illusion by resisting my subliminal, puerile romantic inclinations inch by hard-fought inch, yet I enthusiastically gave myself a mulligan on this one, because, well, it’s Percy, what the hell. (And the girl “smells good.”)

I always give you, my faithful readers, a quote or two to both stretch out these reports a tad to make room for the illustrations, as well as to give you a taste of the author’s style. Writers are always told to “show, don’t tell,” so instead of telling you, as do most of the professionals, about an author’s craftsmanship, wit, grace, what have you, here’s a typical sampling. It not only covers all of the bases mentioned in the above sentence, it addresses an aspect of Percy’s work that invariably appears in critiques of his work, i.e. his Roman Catholicism, to which he converted and defended eloquently ever since. He keeps it sly and indirect in his fiction, and is not afraid to poke a little fun at the religious. Here’s what I mean:

“IT WAS A FINE SUNDAY morning. The foursome teed off early and finished before noon. He drove through town on Church Street. Churchgoers were emerging from the eleven-o’clock service. As they stood blinking and smiling in the brilliant sunlight, they seemed without exception well-dressed and prosperous, healthy and happy. He passed the following churches, some on the left, some on the right: the Christian Church, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, Church of Christ in God, Assembly of God, Bethel Baptist Church, Independent Presbyterian Church, United Methodist Church, and Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church.

“Two signs pointing down into the hollow read: African Methodist Episcopal Church, 4 blocks; Starlight Baptist Church, 8 blocks.

“One sign pointing up to a pine grove on the ridge read: St. John o’ the Woods Episcopal Church, 6 blocks.

“He lived in the most Christian nation in the world, the U.S.A., in the most Christian part of that nation, the South, in the most Christian state in the South, North Carolina.”

The title? Oh, that. Percy and I (via his protagonist, Will Barrett) have a little fun with the biblical notion of End Times. Nothing serious...I think.

Nah...?

 

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

THE PISTOL POETS – Victor Gischler

[Precautionary boilerplate: Highly refined readers should be aware this report aims a tad lower than optimum on the aesthetic spectrum. It is advised that readers even vaguely uncertain of their Joycean Taste Grade quotient proceed with at least a modicum of carefully measured insouciant caution. Thank you.]

I am fully aware of the risk I'm taking here, revealing my marginal literary sensibility by writing about Victor Gischler's The Pistol Poets. “Marginal” my foot, for sure some are thinking. And I did come close to rupturing various vitals laughing at the crude, quirky, frat-boy goings on in this satirically farcical look at an amalgam of gratuitous violence, incessant insobriety, and startling poetics in the presumably idyllic setting of hick-town Okie academia.

Sporadic appreciative sputters continued to diesel thru my larynx next morning on my constitutional walk up and down Main Street as I paid homage to various scenes from this the second of a raft of novels by former English professor Victor Gischler. I would hope the “former” is a reward for his success as a novelist and not punishment for making fun of a milieu that suffers gangsters, poets and drunken English professors. And I perhaps am fortunate not to be posting this report from the recreation room at Happy Daze Rest Home while undergoing observation for reports of unseemly public behavior.

At the same time I nurse a very real, burgeoning anxiety that should my indispensable literary advisor Fictionaut's Kitty Boots happen to stumble upon and read this report she is more than apt to throw her arms up in dismay and discharge me as a client. As I mentioned above, this is for me a risky undertaking--the more alarmingly risky, it's becoming apparent, the more I worry.

Fictionaut's Kitty Boots

But dammit, I love this book, and I shall defend it against all comers, starting with the amateur "reviewers" on Amazon who panned it.

This from Suzanne Graden: The biggest twist was the location of East St. Louis. Last time I checked it was in Illinois not Missouri. After I read the error in the location I lost interest in the book. [An East St. Louis cab driver mugged me when I was drunk on a weekend pass from Ft. Leonard Wood (Missouri) some years back. I didn't give a rat's ass what state we were in--still don't. Nor has the rare brain fart ever bothered me.]

"mmk" says: This is a terrible book - badly, written, crude, uninteresting and simply a waste of time. I hung in there through about 75% of it before finally giving up.
If you're a horny adolescent male who loves chase scenes and guns, knock yourself out. [Safe to assume you are not a horny adolescent male, etc. Alas, my adolescent days today are but a misty dream, yet I know for certain I'd have missed completely the sly ironies and cleverly entendered nuances in The Pistol Poets back then. Dr. Freud lifts an eyebrow and asks: Do you frequently read novels you loathe?]

"Kindle Customer" suggests: I don't know how I finished this book-but for a author that teaches creative writing this was one that should have been buried. [Yet you finished the book. Dr. Freud weeps with joy.]

There are more. Had I read any of them before buying The Pistol Poets, I'd only have been the more intrigued.

Gischler

Several years ago an English professor friend recommended Gischler's work to me, particularly his first two novels: Gun Monkeys and The Pistol Poets. I read Edgar-nominated Gun Monkeys first. My recollection is that I liked it, but I can't recall anything about it. Not sure why or how, but I lost track of The Pistol Poets. Possibly my interests drifted from the genre, or maybe I packed the book for a move and didn't unpack it—something I'm notorious for. Picked it out of a pile the other day when both of my laptops were in the shop and I needed something to read to keep from going berserk. Hooked by the second chapter when an East St. Louis street thug steals a dead victim's papers that indicate the victim has a graduate scholarship to study poetry at the aforementioned hick-town Oklahoma college. Thug decides then and there to turn his life around. He makes off with the gym bag full of cocaine he's supposed to be selling for his boss, (big bad) Red Zach, and heads for “Fumbee”, OK.

I'm not full-bore laughing quite yet but there are preliminary snickers, and I can feel the chortles building as I try to imagine the thug, Harold Jenks, participating in a poetry seminar in any school setting. He lands in Jay Morgan's classroom the same day Morgan awakes with a blinding hangover to find one of his students dead in his bed. He assumes he picked her up at a typical campus party the night before. The plot has thickened by now, but the chortles are still only gathering subliminal force.

Gischler with hair

[Poetry break] Pressed for time, Jenks, using the victim's name, Sherman Ellis, had taken his first verse from a greeting card, and met with derision when he read it to the class. This one he wrote himself:

I was cruising the hood in my red Mercedes,

keeping it real with my homies and my ladies,

nobody can touch my crew because all them cats

are fraidies.

Them St. Louis niggers ain’t got no class,

twitching on the crack bust a cap in my ass.

They rocking and shaken and frying up some

bacon,

but if they think they know Sherman E then they

sadly mistaken.

Gonna POP that COP

C*cks*cker m*therf*cker never make me STOP.

Bleed the bitch out now shout now shout.

On your knees on your knees, show you what it’s

’bout. I’ll pull you a stunt, smoke my blunt Sherman E

don’t

Take sh*t from some c*nt.

After gasped comments by some baffled classmates following Jenks's reading, the instructor, Morgan, “shuffled the stack of poems, stood slowly. He turned, walked out the door. The students waited a minute, looked at one another, but their professor didn’t come back.”

Other characters of dubious interest include Dean Whittaker, interim chair of the English Department, a bearlike man with “a big voice”, whose dissertation had been on ladies' costuming in Elizabethan theater and who wears lace panties despite their considerable discomfort. And let's not overlook “Fred Jones”, the geriatric gangster currently in a witness protection program, who gifts the college with ten grand to keep its “third-rate literary journal” afloat but with the understanding Morgan will read Jones's voluminous portfolio of original poems. Of the slender selection of poems Gischler provides us in The Pistol Poets, this, by Jones, is my favorite. It also won raucous approval from the student body in a college-wide poetry slam. Jones called it The Zydeco Gangster:

When I came from Philly to the Big Easy in ’72

in a baby blue Impala full of smack,

I was already pushing gray around the ears.

And I don’t move so quick no more,

and the back gives me trouble,

and the hands are kinkin’ up.

The hands are key.

So when the dagos hired me

to work the Quarter,

I got a big moulie shadow to do the bone work.

So I went to hear his song

on a humid night in some bayou sh*thole,

and Che was huffin’ on the accordion,

and another bony moulie

was beating time on a washboard,

and the shuffling, breathless racket

sounded like the time we leaned on Tiny Allen

in the homo bar

at the rotten end of Bourbon.

So I’m talking to Little Mike

on the phone

with Big Mike on the extension

and they say everything is jake back in Philly.

I try to explain the zydeco shakedown,

and how it’s so different from

the tearful, slow Pagliacci pleading

when we’d bear down on the mark

like a lumbering toilet-paper mummy

in a Peter Cushing flick,

but they don’t get it.

So I ask Big Mike if he remembers the time

we chopped down the glassblower over on Sullivan

   the brrrrpt da bript brip chingle chingle bript

when we riddled his display cases with Mac-10s,

the nine-millimeter percussion

the tambourine tinkle of broken glass,

and I think he’s starting to get zydeco.

And we laughed and laughed

and wondered if the Motor City fellas

do it to Smokey Robinson.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

THE DISCOMFORT ZONE -- "Jonathan Franzen"

I have come uncomfortably near reaching a conclusion that "Jonathan Franzen" is the most ingenious, elaborately implausible hoax ever perpetrated on the New York literary establishment and, hence, the literary world. My evidence is largely intuitive, but is supported in my mind by what I consider significant clues in the text of the 2006 so-called memoir The Discomfort Zone, of which New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani's severe panning prompted "Franzen" to call her "the stupidest person in New York City."

This, in fact, this girly sounding tantrum (contrasted with Norman Mailer's "one-woman kamikaze" response to the Kakutani castration effect), is the first clue to support my hypothesis. The supposition grew out of an intense distaste for the very name "Franzen," which I associated early on with an incident of shrill elitist arrogance. So far behind the curve of "high" literary fashion at the time (2001), I'd been unfamiliar with the name when it arrived to my attention in a breaking news item. The reputed literary novelist known as "Jonathan Franzen" had just insulted millions of TV megastar Oprah Winfrey's fans by whining publicly her picking his recently published novel The Corrections to feature on her program would endanger his reputation with "high" literary society. Appalled by such shrieking hubris, I banished "Jonathan Franzen" from further literary consideration despite The Corrections proceeding on to bestsellerdom and a National Book Award.

Yesterday, in an unusually forgiving mood, I read my first and likely final "Franzen" work. It seemed an appropriate compromise to break my sixteen-year boycott with the book Ms. Kakutani described as "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed." All true. Ms. Kakutani overlooked one thing, though, as I see it. She assumed the jackass is one person. Nuh uh. The "Jonathan Franzen" who is nearing the pinnacle of commercial and critical literary renown despite his proudly proclaimed noisesomeness is the prankish creation of a group of high school girls allegedly in the upper-middle-class St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves.

My evidence is in the book.

Narrated by "Jonathan Franzen" as a bildungsroman (fashionably literary for "coming-of-age book"), the girly voice gives us glimpses of comically awful parents, and of a not surprisingly awful, oversensitive childhood and early adolescence. Exhibit A:

Of the many things I was afraid of in those days—spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive—I was probably most afraid of my parents. My father had almost never spanked me, but his anger had been Jehovan when he did. My mother possessed claws with which, when I was three or four years old and neighbor kids had filled my hair with Vaseline to achieve a kind of Baby Greaser effect, she’d repeatedly attacked my scalp between dousings of scalding-hot water. Her opinions were even sharper than her claws. You just didn’t want to mess with her. I never would have dared, for example, to take advantage of her absence from the country and break her rules and wear jeans to school, because what if she found out?

"Jonathan Franzen"

To my ear that sounds like a very articulate girl trying to sound like a very articulate boy. More evidence? This, from adolescence, while sounding a tad more boyish, is yet to me the very same voice:

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. But the real cause of death, as I saw it, was my mother’s refusal to let me wear jeans to school. Even my old friend Manley, who played drums and could do twenty-three pull-ups and was elected class president in ninth grade, could not afford to see me socially.

I must admit remembering a few similar anxieties at that age. But I had no interest in Tolkien, am not much of a punster, and I cannot imagine at any age deliberately insulting any girl who was friendly to me. I'm rather certain, as well, I did not exhibit the flighty attitude.

With our narrator now in college one might expect the self-conscious tone to have cowboyed up beyond suspicion. It hasn't. It's gotten worse. He visits a girl he'd been sweet on (yet calls her by her last name, Siebert) at her college. She'd broken her back trying a silly stunt our narrator characteristically thinks she did to compete for his affection with a different girl he'd dated who did the same stunt (it's complicated). Siebert is healed now, and she and our narrator are talking about Freud and how maybe some subconscious notion caused her to let go and fall from the Eden Seminary bell tower downspout she'd been trying to climb. Our narrator starts pondering, to himself, his own susceptibility to awful subconscious notions, like when as a boy he suddenly dropped his pants to entertain a couple of neighbor girls peeking through a window at him from their house. His pondering gets the best of him: "I started screaming in terror. I screamed at the top of my lungs, which freaked both me and Siebert out. Then I went back to Philadelphia and put the whole episode out of my mind."

"Franzen" 1977

Puzzling, isn't it? Hard to imagine a college male not on drugs (which our narrator never mentions in this scene) doing something like that, so excessively. And then writing about it so coyly. Puzzling, unless you buy my assumption, which depends of course on more evidence than merely a purported man's unmanly voice, of a grand conspiracy. I see plenty of conspiratorial clues in the high school portion of this bildungsroman.

Our narrator claims to have been the brains of a tightly knit group of fellows calling themselves DIOTI (don't ask) that on several occasions broke into their high school to pull highly sophisticated, labor-intensive, and, in one instance quite dangerous, pranks. Again, nuh uh. Not credible. No self-respecting group of high school dudes, including a football player, would suffer such a preening, punning, horn-rimmed dork as their brains in a dangerous undertaking. Not a chance these pranksters did what the book claims. Not a chance they were guys. They were girls. Brilliant, literary, highly imaginative girls, and they've played--are playing--one helluva mind-jiggling, thigh-thumping, literate-world-embracing prank. Middle-aged now, these ladies continue cranking out literature highly regarded by high literature's golden gatekeepers. Why, at this rate they might wind up winning a Pulitzer, even the Nobel. And if they do win one or the other, or both, their figurehead, DIOTI's token male whom the world knows as "Jonathan Franzen," whom DIOTI no doubt took unto its collective bosom primarily for his improvisational acting talents, will gladly and gracefully deliver whatever statements and/or speeches of gratitude the women of DIOTI create for him to hail the socially realistic "New Sincerity" glories of humanity, which will not merely endure, but will prevail, etc. etc.

But...you know? Come to think of it, I really can't imagine anything even remotely stupider.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]