Month: October 2010

Of course you know about the power point presentation within this text. (If you don’t there is one and it’s brilliant, funny and eerily collapsible as a way of seeing how writers may think.) But there’s artistry of a much more subtle kind, everywhere in this book. I’m awed by the way Egan shuttles in time and space giving us pure mind at various ages and in both sexes. She moves the camera so that ,Mindy , for example,  is both the too pretty, bimbo girlfriend of an older, much divorced, rich man and a thoughtful, caring, graduate student with plans far beyond her current beau. A gaggle of punk rock kids in San Francisco in the early eighties are spiked and pinned and blue-haired and they are also fragile, self-conscious about their freckles and spend afternoons eating one mother’s homemade sweet yogurts after school,  and giving head to said older divorced man. A punk rock boy becomes a seasoned music producer with a kleptomaniac assistant. The situations are interesting enough but the time travel is masterful. In it, we can compare past and present, and understand although we only see impressionistically, how time both ripens and warps.

People are types and they are also much more than that (or less than that as the case may be.) Characters attest to be real but they can’t be any more real than the types that we allow ourselves to see. Authors go beneath types, inside of them and sometimes they don’t. Is one mode better than another? Does it matter? It may not matter, that Patty Berglund is a type that we know and that we can’t get inside of  (any more than her spouse, children or anyone else she knows can.)  If the type shimmers with a resonance that is huge, cultural, imbedded and infinite (in terms of how many individuals could be packed inside of it) which hers is, than that type works. And so I believe the hype….and also the criticism. But I think Franzen is brilliant at alluding to a world that is by nature unknowable, and limning all the ways the thicket of our world tricks us and keeps us at bay. The tragedy, after all, is not knowing who we are.

By turns lyrical and colloquial, Michael Cunningham’s prose gracefully elucidates ways of thinking, specifically the ways of Peter and Rebecca, a long married couple, which are imbedded in the ways of New York intelligentsia in 2010. The novel offers unusual insight into ordinary lives, and suggests that our aesthetic impulses, our need for beauty is universal, damming and redeeming. I love his writing so much, the musicality that is always undercut with casual, almost deprecating language and the way he lets us in on the secrets we keep with ourselves. Within pages Cunningham eludes to Joyce, Woolf, Tolstoy, and Styxx thereby illustrating how art– both high and popular–illuminates our own lives. Oh, and we’re also treated to a detailed description of cunnilingus from Peter’s point of view within chapter one! Peter thinks “Does she ever fake it? Better not to know.” Yet, we are so grateful to know what these palpably real characters are thinking.