Not a Review of AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner

     Expectations are double-edged swords. We usually associate them with fodder for disappointment, our hopes dashed to bitters and salt, our valuable time frittered to ashes for the wind to scatter. When I picked up my first sample of William Faulkner, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, I expected his incomparable reputation to welcome me with a fanfare of trumpets and rose petals on the ground. But the book’s southern fried stream of consciousness frustrated me and left me cold. LIGHT IN AUGUST largely moved me but also stretched beyond my tolerance. 

     But our expectation of disappointment is also an invitation to surprise, to sumptuous, revelatory surprise that collects, builds, and blooms into unforeseeable joy that makes us over anew. When I picked up AS I LAY DYING a week ago, I expected it to be more of a travail, one that would reinforce my respect for Faulkner but little more. I did not expect to read one of the best novels I’ve ever read, to have a transformative experience that would challenge my expectations of what a novel could be and what people are.

     The book’s skin is little more than the journey of the Bundrens, a family of uneducated farmers in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, to bury Addie Bundren, the family matriarch, in her hometown, several miles away. That’s it. Simple. But the Bundrens largely embrace simplicity, require it. It allows them to deal with a crushing existence of uncontrollable complexities. They can’t hope to grasp the political, economic, and cultural vicissitudes that conspire to cast them among the downtrodden. But they still want answers, answers to the Big Questions we all wrestle with. And they want answers they can hold in their hands. The simplest, easiest to hold is god. Some, like Cora Tull, cleave too strongly. Some, like Whitfield, not nearly enough. Some, like Cash, turn to personal integrity with steadfast, uncomplicated purity. Some, like his father Anse, pay integrity plenty of lip service while playing the victim to the hilt. 

     Faulkner doesn’t paint the struggle for purpose and meaning in soft, pliant pastels. Even its depiction is complex, with no set consequences for specific patterns of conduct.  Anse cons the pious Addie into marrying him, only then revealing himself to be lazy, selfish, and vain. Meanwhile, Addie falls from her own lofty heights of grace and goes to her grave wracked with guilt. Darl’s wisdom exceeds his actual intellect. He recognizes the multifaceted anarchy of his life, but is undone by his inability to cope with it. Jewel is equally incapacitated within a metaphysical silence, but he resorts to action without contemplation. Thinking about it is just too frustrating, too frightening, yet he survives. Dewey Dell is blessed with a preternatural intuition she cannot rationalize. She knows, perhaps more than any other character, but cannot understand. Yet, you finish the book feeling that she too will survive, despite the hole that asshole Anse has unwittingly dug for her.

     Faulkner reveals deep sympathy and empathy for his characters. He structures the book so that each chapter tells a part of the story from one character’s unique perspective (Think A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, younger readers). But Faulkner also grants those characters the agency to speak in their own voice. The care he takes, crafting each voice with an individual patois and sensibility that we are quick to recognize, speaks to the respect he has for even the villainous Anse and Whitfield. They are as much a product of their hard, indecipherable world as the blameless Cash and Dewey Dell or the more problematic Darl and Jewel.

     Faulkner respects these people and so many people like them that he elevates their story to a mythic scope. The text is peppered with small allusions to the Bible and Greek mythology, but the story itself is a medley of religious highlights. Death itself is the motivator of countless myths and legends. Addie’s death causes a downpour of diluvian proportions, and the Bundrens must at one point ford a torrential river straight out of the Old Testament. Even the crime Darl commits toward the end of the book can be seen as a misguided recasting of the Prometheus myth, and like Prometheus Darl is damned for nothing short of blasphemy. Hell, the family’s journey itself is part Exodus, part Xenophon’s march of ten thousand. Raising the story to eschatological heights is not only appropriately metaphorical. It lends great and edifying value to the lives and struggles of people some of us could easily dismiss. 

     I finished the book two days ago, and I am still reeling. I simply did not expect, could not have expected the experience of reading it. Maybe that’s what the novel comes down to. Expectations. The reader’s, the characters’, ours in general. To expect is to assume you have worked out the elusive order underpinning all of existence. But as we all know, life will constantly surprise you, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes violently. Sometimes it will do both and leave you beside yourself, feeling a fool for daring to predict the path it is leading you down, but also feeling enervated, alive, enraptured by the unknowable possibilities that lay before you. AS I LAY DYING did not simply exceed my expectations. It ground them into powder and blew them into my face. 

Not a Review of BLEEDING EDGE by Thomas Pynchon

     By definition critics turn criticism into a career, but they often raise disappointment to the level of art. We read some reviews and think, Oh, that one’s sharp, has good taste and a certain alacrity with the written word. Then a book comes along, and those same critics we found so illuminating completely miss the boat. They should have been sounding the clarion call for the novel of its time, for a novel that peels away the scabrous obfuscations and shallow preoccupations that litter the cultural dialogue, that cuts deep into the quick and teaches the lessons we’re most in need of. It’s frustrating enough when the new book comes from the pen of a relative unknown. When it’s coming from the inimitable Thomas Pynchon it’s unforgivable.

     Pynchon has made an illustrious career of reanimating the past with madcap vibrancy and breathtaking wisdom, of translating it and revealing the secret roots of the present at its most confounding. In BLEEDING EDGE he hews closer to the present than he has at any point since V. Published in 1963 V was set partially at the height of Eisenhower conformity in 1956, just as The Sixties as we know it was coming of age. BLEEDING EDGE is set in the several months bookending September 11, and the seminal event of our time is the seminal event of its story.

     Thomas Pynchon was the rock star gunslinger for years, the voice of his generation, but he’s in his seventies now. He’s an elder statesman looking back at opportunities squandered, but don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s aged into a bitchy old man hiding in the walled-off world of his own devising, selfishly lamenting how the young have wasted all the ground he and his gained. No. Pynchon gets it. He hasn’t curled up in a cave of glowing reputation. He has engaged the world, and its creature comforts and most poisonous vices are as obvious to him as they are to you and me. That’s where the genius of BLEEDING EDGE resides, in our distractions and ambitions and in particular our most debilitating weakness: fear.

     Maxine Tarnow is a single mother and freelance fraud investigator who starts looking into the suspicious finances of a computer security firm and its ubergeek CEO, Gabriel Ice. As with every Pynchon novel the premise doesn’t matter nearly as much as the cavalcade of oddball characters and near-absurd episodes that course through the pages. And what could be more insane that September 11, an event that Pynchon posits has left our whole country in nothing less than a post-traumatic regression into infantilized self-absorption?

     The pop culture nerds, the computer geeks, the hackers have all taken refuge in online simulacra, the architecture throbbing with a digital marrow coded for the instant gratification of their escapist dreams. Gabriel Ice, the villain, is the geek gone over to the Dark Side, trembling with the anticipation of flexing his unparalleled intelligence. Take away his fortune and he’s AwesomeSauce42 on the Ainitcool message boards. And the book’s older characters suffer the same plague of self-satisfied sturm-und-drang. Maxine’s lifelong friend, now in her forties, thinks she can still play the Upper West Side J.A.P., simultaneously fending off and entertaining the advances of the Wall Street up-and-comers. Maxine’s surrogate mother, formerly an anti-establishment flower child who railed against Vietnam and Kent State and screamed for Nixon’s head on a pike, has aged into a paranoid conspiracy-theorizing muckraker with a blog.

     Only Maxine is aware of the turn her nation has taken. She understands the lure of anonymity. She feels the sensuous warmth of its liberating ephemera. She loves her children, loves being a mom, but the youthful vitality of chasing the bad guys is a narcotic. She could see herself back with her ex-husband. He has his flaws, but he’s a good father and a good man. But, oh, that corrupt CIA spook excites her like the boys she danced and shared bumps with at the clubs back when the future wasn’t worth considering. She’d love to dole out advice to her friends, set them on the right path, but how can she do that and avoid becoming that yenta of a mother she’s spent her whole life not being? Maxine is as scared as anyone, of the truth, of uncertainty, of death. 

     But…

     And that’s why she’s the hero of BLEEDING EDGE. When the unthinkable occurs, when the unimaginable goes down, when terror becomes an unavoidable reality, our culture is given a stark choice, and Maxine alone makes the right one. She doesn’t retreat into an imaginary garden of digital delights. She embraces a brick-and-mortar world, well aware that it sits always on the precipice of self-immolation.

     I could go on and on about Pynchon’s dynamite prose, his character development, his sense of humor and dramaturgy, but all of that is something you as the reader either get or you don’t. But if you are plugged in at all, you would be deaf, dumb, and blind to deny the sage and quiet heroism at the heart of BLEEDING EDGE’s message. You have to face the world no matter the terror. Your only other option is to inhabit a fraudulent existence, a world that is not real. And if your world is not real, what makes you think you’re real?

NOT A REVIEW OF "RED STATE" BY KEVIN SMITH

            Being a fan of Kevin Smith is often like being his friend. We like what he does, but we also like him. We have a deep investment in him as a human being we don’t have in other filmmakers or podcasters. His openness with us, how much he brings us into his heart, is a key part of why we have remained loyal to him for so many years. In the past Kevin has even referred to his overall career as “the conversation.” It’s apropos because friendships often feel like epic, multi-part conversations that continue through the years. We first met Kevin through CLERKS, and with each of his projects the friendship has grown, the conversation has taken on more nuance and become more interesting.

            But have you ever had a friendship that has spanned many years? It’s a friendship that’s always made you laugh, put a smile on your face, made you feel good about yourself and made the tough moments in life a little more bearable? Then one day, your friend confides in you? They let the shield of pride or machismo or whatever drop and you suddenly see a side of your friend you never knew was there? A side that not only makes you re-evaluate your friend but also makes you excited to get to know them all over again?

            That’s RED STATE.

            Everything Kevin has said about RED STATE is true. But there’s so much more to it that he’s never touched on, and it relates directly to “the conversation.” All of Kevin’s previous movies have taken an honest, believable look at whatever issues each has explored. Each one of them has embodied a positive, optimistic perspective that maintains a strong faith in the inherent decency of people. That aspect of Kevin’s point of view is still present in RED STATE, but suddenly the conversation has grown more complicated. The conversation gets real. Kevin has opened up as he never has before. Yes, he shares his views with us on a daily basis, but he is not an ideologue. He is a normal human being wrestling with the same conflicting emotions that pull us all in opposite directions every day. It’s fitting that RED STATE has been released in these increasingly nihilistic times. Do we live by our principles to our last breath or do the ends justify corrupting ourselves? Should we offer forgiveness or indulge our rage? We are all emotional creatures who miraculously possess the capacity for reason. By which measure should we govern our lives? And if the goal is to balance the two, how do we do so?

Every character in RED STATE has to answer those questions through the course of the movie. But fictional characters are lucky. Their lives end when the credits roll. Ours continue on for who knows how long with no answers in sight. The good news is, hopefully, we get to ponder those questions in the company of intelligent, compassionate friends. Kevin Smith is one of those friends and, as RED STATE proves, he’ll always keep the conversation lively and memorable.