I can’t believe I’m admitting to having read this book. It has an emoticon in the title. Consider its inclusion on this blog a radical sign of my regard for you and this reading documentation project.

So, my family were fairly early internet adopters. I’m not talking crazy-early, but I seem to remember making the transition from playing Asteroids on my dad’s work laptop (amber and black screen, baby) in primary school to keenly exploiting ICQ, IRC and WBS in the first year or so of high school. I loved it. My sister and I used to play word games on IRC all the time. (This is so embarrassing.) Since access rates were much cheaper in non-peak times, I used to get up at 4 am to get on the internet. I had to muffle the dial tone because it was so loud. I’d listen to the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream very quietly every morning and chat to my best online friend, David, who worked at a tile store in the Western suburbs. Ah, youth!

Probably because of this obsessive internet use, my sister and I were given two books called Chat and Connect, both by Nan McCarthy. We loved these books: the series is essentially a epistolary internet romance. Beverly, an editor (spookily prescient) who is tetchy, sharp and married, and Maximilian – a flirtatious copywriter – meet through an INTERNET FORUM ABOUT WRITING. Behold the power of ‘e-mail’ to connect strangers:

> Private Mail
> Date: Friday, July 14, 1995 1:48 a.m.
> From: Maximilian@miller&morris.com
> Subj: Hello
> To: BevJ@frederic_gerard.com

Beverly, (is that your real name?)

I’ve seen your messages in the Writer’s Forum and you seem to know a lot about computers. I’m thinking of upgrading my old ’386 PC and I’m wondering if you can give me any advice on whether I should buy a PC or a Macintosh.

Also, I noticed in your member profile that you’re an editor. Where do you work? I’m a copywriter…maybe we could get together sometime.

Maximilian (that’s my real name)

> Private Mail
> Date: Monday, July 17, 1995 7:32 a.m.
> From: BevJ@frederic_gerard.com
> Subj: Thanks, but No Thanks
> To: Maximilian@miller&morris.com

Maximilian:

I really don’t like to give advice on whether a person should buy a Mac or a PC, especially because I know nothing about the way you work and what you want to accomplish with your computer. If you’re just going to be doing word processing, it probably doesn’t matter whether you use a Mac or a PC.

I’m sorry I don’t have time to chat but I’m under a lot of deadlines at the moment.

p.s. Just in case you didn’t notice, my member profile says I’m married.

I trust you get the drift. The rest of Chat is full of inquisitive gems like this: ‘What does “BTW” mean? And why did you put asterisks around one of your words?’ You can check out the rest of the first chapter of Chat here. If you want to. I bet you do. If you don’t, spoiler alert: Maximilian, that wily copywriter, eventually wears down the wary Beverly’s defences with his charm. Then, Beverly and Maximilian meet at a MacWorld conference and have a little fling. Saucy! Eventually, they fall in love. Wow! The internet is awesome!

But, as I said, my sister and I only had the first two books. We couldn’t find the third book in the series, Crash, in any local bookshops. McCarthy wrote the books just as Amazon was starting up, and, being high school kids, we didn’t have the resources to track down the third book overseas. The other week, however, my sister stormed into my room and said: ‘Guess what I bought today?’ I’m a stolid type, so I waited patiently for her to tell me. With a flourish, she brought the book out from behind her back: she’d sourced it from one of Amazon’s second-hand partners. I think it cost her $12, despite the huge orange ‘$2.99′ sticker pasted to the front.

She read it first. It took her about thirty minutes, and after that she dropped it into my hands with a look on her face that said it had not lived up to expectations. Having always been dubious about revisiting the subject of our childhood enthusiasm, I approached it with a kind of enthusiastic disdain, which was resoundingly rewarded.

It’s a page-turner, that’s for sure. Connect ended with Max and Beverly organising a weekend tryst, and in Crash, they have just, um, ‘connected’. They’re now irreversibly in love, and the book is full of the puppyish revelations I’m sure plagued the early days of the internet – or, for that matter, any kind of early romantic relationship. Highlights for me included a twelve-page ‘transcript’ of a forum on copyright hosted by Bev: informative! Lowlights included Max’s description of a sexual act between the two on a pier: gross! And the ending, which is kind of stupidly literal (hint: think about the title).

Thus ends this wander through memory lane. It was pretty enjoyable, I have to say, but extremely trashy. I may have to go dig out Villette or something, to compensate.

I requested Madeleine St John’s The Essence of the Thing for review on Textual Fantasies because I was fascinated by what critics say about St John. I’d never heard of her, but when Text re-issued her novels, it became possible to read a slew of printed praise for her writing, including, from Michelle de Kretser: ‘It is to be hoped that St John, who is woefully undervalued [in Australia], will at last be recognised as the best novelist we never had’. Big call. So, of course, it was necessary to read Madeleine St John immediately.

And, of course, I’m glad I did. It’s a break-up story, albeit one which is tart and charming. Nicola — lovely, clever, loyal — comes home from a cigarette run to the home she shares with Jonathan to this:

Jonathan shrugged very slightly and then got impatiently to his feet. He leaned an arm against the mantelpiece; if there had been a fire he would certainly have poked it. As it was, he looked unseeingly at the objects at his elbow and moved a china poodle dog. Then he looked up at her again. ‘There’s no nice way to say this,’ he said. ‘But I’ve decided – that is, I’ve come to the conclusion – that we should part.’

Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of similar words will appreciate the swirling confusion that follows such a scene. Nicola’s first reaction to this giant unilateral shift is disbelief: ‘this is just a sort of joke which I haven’t yet understood’; this quickly turns to shock and anger. Later, she manages to pull herself together into a kind of utterly practical and even hopeful embracer of change: it’s not a book with a lot of wallowing. And it’s as far from psychiatry-era emotional-damage-lit as you can get. Rather, The Essence of the Thing illustrates the wretchedness of a regular end to a regular relationship with endlessly empathetic focus on the kaleidoscope twist such an event usually represents.

St John is talented at sketching character with very few words. It’s not a dense book, and it has very short chapters, which tootles the whole thing along very quickly. In that way, it’s rather televisual. I particularly like her dialogue, which is pithy but veridical:

‘What’s your dad doing?’
‘Watching telly.’
‘Take him a caramel then.’

There are lots of characters in this book, mostly couples: the newly-split couple’s respective parents and different sets of Nicola and Jonathan’s shared friends. But they’re all lively in separate skins, all able to be told apart. St John very lovingly pokes fun at the many foibles a person encounters in life’s cast of friends and family, and occasionally enjoys a joke at the expense of her adopted national character (she moved to England in the 1960s): ‘I must, she thought, just concentrate on what comes next, and try to live through this as decently as I can. She was not British for nothing.’ I also loved the little kid, Guy, who is very good-natured and is constantly exclaiming in the time-honoured British way: ‘Cor!’ (as opposed to: ‘Oh my god, that is so random’). And Nicola herself is wonderful, with her smiles as easy as her tears, her passim French words and her desire just to get on with things after Jonathan leaves.

The Essence of the Thing is a tender exploration of the middle-class break-up: the turmoil and resilience that can still be suffered by the person whose basic physical and financial needs are all taken care of: the emotional niceties of awkward asset dissolution, the solitude and pendulum swings of someone undertaking to demolish a long-term relationship, what to do with the marmalade your ex-partner’s mother has gifted you with, what to do with the collection of china dogs. What is interesting about The Essence of the Thing is how ordinary all the characters and situations are. People are, of course, drawn to stories that can tell them things they might never find out if they relied purely on their own experience: other countries, other lives and other loves. But readers also love to feel the fizz of recognition between themselves and a story, and in that, this book excels.

When Maddie and I interviewed John Hunter of Hunter Publishers a month or so back, he brought along a stack of books for us, an expansive gesture that Maddie, better tenacious of her good breeding than I am (sorry, Mum and Dad) took the lead in declining to fully exploit. But neither of us could resist taking one book each from the proffered pile, and there was a dog fight over Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay. I won — spurred by Older Sister Entitlement Syndrome — and Maddie took away the tantalising, not-really-second-place Oink Oink Oink by Eric Yoshiaki Dando.

I’m not usually a scrapper, and I don’t think Maddie is either. But John was describing how he’d discovered Manguso’s writing — she’s a poet and short fiction writer, an Iowa alum — and came to buy the Australian rights to The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir about her experience with a disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP). Both us girls (well, I’m extrapolating from how I felt) were intrigued and touched by the story and its short-sections format, and I got stuck into it pretty much straight away.

Like most human dramas seem to do, Manguso’s sickness crept up on her without any warning. One morning in 1995, when she was washing her face, she couldn’t catch her breath and her hands started tingling. It was a strange affliction that became more severe over the next couple of days, though with the average person’s blithe lack of presentiment for catastrophe, her worry was mostly directed at the collateral effects:

I was concerned I’d caught a strange illness, but I was more concerned that I looked drunk. I was staggering around, even to and from breakfast, and I felt people looking at me and thinking it might be time for an intervention.

Only a day later, she fell down in her university’s courtyard. Her mother took her to the hospital and in twelve hours she was hooked up to a machine and warned that she would be intubated through a hole in her neck if she deteriorated any further.

What followed was four years of medical treatment so intense that ‘intrusive’ doesn’t quite cover it. In CIDP, the immune system secretes antibodies into the blood, and these antibodies destroy the patient’s neurons. To avoid the effects of this self-destructive cycle, Manguso had to undergo apheresis, ‘from the Greek aphairein, to take away’. Her blood was fed into a machine that spun the blood into its separate components, removed the poisoned parts — in Manguso’s case, the plasma — and guided back into the body once mixed with saline and artificial plasma.

The matter-of-fact way in which Manguso describes the effects and the equipment of her illness is simple, though not inhumane or stark. She reports the taste and the cold of the plasma infusions, inescapable because they are inside her; and it’s difficult not to put one’s hand to one’s neck and close the book and be of one’s own body for a moment. Weakness is one of the accompanying detriments of CIDP, with the limbs becoming too impuissant for common tasks. This leads to impossibilities where once there was effortlessness: the section entitled ‘Blood and Shit’ tells of the cheerful nurse who ‘really knew how to wipe an ass’, and Manguso’s gratefulness for the competency with which her favourite staff would accomplish these intimate duties. Less able to be imparted without horror are the tales of professional inadequacy. In ‘The Sikh’:

He tried again and again to jam the tube into my vein. Every now and then he had to stop and apply pressure, as I was bleeding. At one point I thought I felt a jet of blood spurt into my chest cavity, and that’s when I lost my composure.

Months later, after his hair had gone from steel gray to white, my father told me it had looked like a horror movie.

While her writer’s nous enables her to figure her observations as salient themes or lessons, Manguso’s poet sense also conveys understanding in impressionistic flashes. At ‘The End’, she learns to ‘pay attention’; and that ‘to pay attention is to love everything’: a conclusion as comprehensive and inscrutable as monks’ replies to koans.

Not elegiac, but clear and aware, Manguso’s memoir is a bright prism for insight into the matrix of sickness and strength. Written seven years after her recovery, The Two Kinds of Decay uses a structure of fragments to translate life’s linear chaos into something multifaceted and utterly graspable. In a cruel bracket of life where the words ‘prednisone’ and ‘bolus’ and ‘fear’ become daily companions, and doctors and nurses number among the most common cast members, humanity might be a person’s most precious and most tenuous asset. Manguso’s powers of pellucid distillation guarantee the preservation of that humanity in the telling of a story with the power to all but devour it.

***

Next on the list for me is certainly some of Manguso’s poetry. Also, she is working on a novel: ‘it’s called The Guardians, and it’s about surveillance and paranoia’.

How I felt about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, somewhat in the style of said book:

This is a book I didn’t read for a long time, because sometimes it gives me extremely heavy boots thinking about books that lots of other people have read and I haven’t read yet, and on top of that, it’s a book about a so, so sad thing in recent Western history that is very confusing and distressing. Anyway, I finally got around to reading it, and I really liked it, and it definitely wasn’t shiitake like I was scared it would be. Actually, you need a big place inside you to store this book. That’s how much I liked it.

This is a book about a boy called Oskar Schell, who is extremely clever and endearing — that is, if you like smart kids who have no friends — and whose family has suffered a lot, including when Oskar’s father died when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. One day, Oskar finds a key in an envelope that has BLACK written on it, and this makes him EXTREMELY DEPRESSED VERY EXCITED INCREDIBLY DETERMINED, since he thinks it has something to do with his dad. So he tries to find out which of the 162 million locks in New York City the key opens, and along the way he meets people like Mr. Black, who was born on January 1, 1901, and has a bibliographical index with cards and a one-word biography (“Henry Kissinger: war!” “Tom Cruise: money!”) for tens of thousands of people.

Another thing that Jonathan Safran Foer does with this book is talk about the impulse of documentation that comes from love, and how it helps people process things and also, how much people love words and pictures. It’s also about doing things even though they hurt us. Oskar has a scrapbook titled Stuff That Happened to Me and it looks like this:

Oskar’s grandfather can’t speak and he has to also write a lot, and he has plenty of notebooks that have just one word or phrase on them, like this:

MJ Hyland is one of my 2009 obsessions. First reason: watch this SlowTV video to see why. Just two minutes will do. Are you back? That powerfully resonant voice, her dark lipstick, the way she described her third book, This Is How, as her ‘turd’ novel: Hyland has a kind of terrible, magnetic charisma. I’ve heard she only eats meat and chocolate. I’m terrified of her, and I’ve never even met her. Second reason: Carry Me Down, which is almost a perfect book.

I’ve written before about how I seem to be reading a lot of books that feature a child as the main character lately – Lindqvist’s Let the Right One in, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Larbalestier’s Liar quickly come to mind. Carry Me Down is no different, with eleven-year-old John Egan’s tale beginning as follows:

It is January, a dark Sunday in winter, and I sit with my mother and father at the kitchen table. My father sits with his back to the table, his feet pressed against the wall, a book in his lap. My mother sits to my right and her book rests on the table. I sit close to her, and my chair, which faces the window, is near the heat of the range.

There is a pot of hot tea in the middle of the table and we each have a cup and plate. There are ham and turkey sandwiches on the plates and, if we want more to eat or drink, there is plenty. The pantry is full.

It’s an incomparable picture of familial equanimity, simple and affecting. If a child could feel this at ease and complete on a day of no import, perhaps the family described is like this every day. And if this is an ‘every day’, then it’s a warmly intellectual family: the cat’s name is Crito, and the book John’s father, Michael, is reading is called Phrenology and the Criminal Cranium. He is studying for a university entrance exam and plays word games with John at table, encouraging John to spar with him using the tales of Sisyphus and Tantalus.

Of course, it’s not long until these perfect elements shift and grate against one another. Helen, John’s mother, is changeable. She fends off and interrogates John as she might an adult: ‘You were staring again. You were staring at me’; or she is charming, engaged, fun — a delightful mother who tickles and tells stories. John’s grandmother is there too, or rather, the three Egans live with her, as Michael hasn’t been employed for three years. Michael himself is a gamble at the best of times. One day, he and John must drown the kittens Crito has borne. When John challenges his resolve (‘I knew you couldn’t kill them’), Michael takes one of the kittens in his hand and smashes its head on the bath, and then says he is not sad about what he has done. However, John knows that his father is lying.

John’s realisation precipitates not a readjustment of the way he sees his family, but an obsession with becoming a human lie detector. Obsession is a boon to any plot, but the way Hyland ascribes it to this young boy is both sympathetic and disturbing. John creates a journal called the Gol of Seil and records inside it every lie he witnesses. It’s a simple project that echoes the limits of his ability to understand the many societal roles of untruths, whether they are (in his taxonomy) major, minor or white. His attempt to control the emotional chaos that is bristling around him is touching and remarkably single-minded. As John Egan attempts to strip the people around him of his lies, so too does he strip his world of its protective buffers and linings, uprooting a thorn bush of a family that had well tangled itself across and into the ground. It’s riveting to read, and the results are severe to experience.

Carry Me Down uses deceptively simple language to uncover a fraught domestic world, one in which the players begin with a face for each other and us, through the child John; and another for other times and other places. I said at the outset that Carry Me Down is an ‘almost perfect’ novel, and these other lives evaporate a little towards the end, a little unnaturally. But there’s no denying the power and beauty of this novel. Read it and weep.

So, it’s David Foster Wallace Week here at 3000 BOOKS. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace Week, but that would be more unwieldy than a 50x real size Rubik’s Cube. Imagine permuting the LL corners on that. I loved Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and there were a few things I wanted to get my head around (or, in some cases, simply put into a list). So, this week there will be multiple posts dealing with various aspects of my reading of this book.

What did you get up to this weekend? How about me, you say? Oh, well, just THIS: righteous bruises.

What do I say about this book? Just be brief: ‘I hated it’? Simply state the facts: ‘This book contains 13 short stories’? Attempt to entertain instead of just being grumpy by exaggerating my response: ‘I was so bored while reading this book that I started to wonder if it would be okay to return it to the person I borrowed it from with “I want those hours of my life back, Vladimir” written in eyeliner on the front cover’? Just ask rhetorical questions instead of actually writing something of substance? Hokay, then.

Trying to formulate a compelling comment about a book I disliked so much feels like being in the chair of a halitosic dentist after having eaten nothing but sweets for seven years. I’ve read Lolita, of course, a long time ago, and remember being enthusiastic in no minor way about it. Nabokov’s faculty for witty and beautiful language is an absolute treat in that book. His familiar/formal tone perfectly made present the strangeness of child-lover Humbert Humbert. Just think upon this little excerpt:

Finally, on a Californian beach, perverse privacy in a kind of cave whence you could hear the separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but the fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lo was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had as little desire for her as for a manatee.

Just look at that sentence structure, all elegant echoes; and the way Humbert seems fussy, while the language itself is not. I picked this sentence out pretty well at random, but it’s a juicy one: clean and balanced and alliterative; a tensile string prettily plucked at its end.

The problem in Nabokov’s Dozen (and who on earth picked that title?) isn’t the language. It’s a collection from which an interested random-excerpter could easily isolate many sweetly flavoured phrases of incomparable virtuosity and verve. I love this, from the end of ‘Signs and Symbols’:

His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again.

I mean, you can’t fault this writing. And there is a lot of the real breathtaking, high-wire stuff in here, too: there are model firmaments and teetotums gyrating and things get a bit violaceous. A reader’s attention can be well fed by writing like this for a little while. But there’s only so much this reader could take before she began to feel herself giving less and less of a shit about what happens. Sentences like these are fabulous on their own, but they aren’t put to much use in Nabokov’s Dozen. Instead, they have the brave, panicky sense of having been shoved up against each other like prize pooches at an animal show that’s particularly short on space.

Part of why this book failed to fully charm me can be characterised as a tendency towards over-the-top drama. Two of the stories have similar plosive endings, even though the characters and the situations are quite different. Just use your imagination a little bit, Vlad. However, these two stories were the ones I probably enjoyed the most in the collection, seeing as they actually had some drama in them. One was ‘Spring in Fialta’, a lovely but distant chase through a man’s memories of a woman, Nina, whom he loved but never managed to properly hold on to. The other, ‘The Aurelian’, tells the story of Paul Pilgram, a seller of butterflies, whose life is unexpectedly enlivened by the arrival of a customer with great enthusiasm for Pilgram’s colourful specimens. It’s a gorgeous story that depicts with pathos the inevitable decline of dreams, which is made more cruel by the exotic, unattainable nature of the insects Pilgram loves so much. Bonus points: Nabokov was a real-life butterfly enthusiast.

But there are some stories that lacked drama, or even any narrative drive. The final story, ‘Lance’, is like an overworded version of The Little Prince, with gerbils. I gave up on trying to understand what was happening — and I think only a couple of lines really served the ‘plot’ — and tried not to get a headache from all the florid prose. A couple of the stories are based loosely on people from Nabokov’s past; his childhood French instructor gets a look in (‘Mademoiselle O’) and his first beloved, as well (‘First Love’). Non-climactic and strongly sentimental, these are more like personal essays than stories per se. I don’t know why he bothered to fictionalise them; they might even have been more interesting as actual essays.

So, I don’t think I will be reading this. I might have to re-read Lolita soon, though. I really like stories with strong narrative arcs and finely judged moral or character tension. Good luck finding much of that in Nabokov’s Dozen. The writing’s nice, though.