Four books that won’t leave me alone

“Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda.” (Europe Central, William T. Vollmann)

I have a secret to admit to you: I don’t exclusively read Slavic fiction. Now that we’re nearing four years of reading Slavic fiction semi-professionally, my fun reading seems to diverge ever further from the region. 

It’s not that I’m tired of Slavic literature. In fact, the truth is just the opposite. Every year I grow more curious about more eras, more regions. Matt is getting tired of me proposing an in-depth look at Soviet socialist realism outside the borders of the Russian SFSR. Apparently that’s more of a research project than a fun podcast idea.

So my interests have always trended away from specialization. That’s the same reason I mostly don’t read Slavic fiction for fun. I want my reading to constantly challenge me on topics or times or themes that I don’t usually consider. As I used to say when I was 19 and a lot more sure about the world: comfort is complacency. 

To celebrate nearly four years of this podcast, I decided to write down some thoughts about four books that just won’t leave me alone. Email any complaints or threats about my analysis to Matt (or you can join our Discord and @ me). 

July, July (2002) by Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien’s oeuvre is, by and large, a reaction to his time as a soldier fighting the American war in Vietnam. But nothing lasts forever, even a theme. July, July is a novel all about those things which do not last, telling the story of a college class’ 30th reunion. The people who attend — those still alive, at least — are long past their hot-headed days as activists, soldiers, draft dodgers. Now they raise kids, divorce spouses, work as lawyers and teachers, get murdered. 

It is a novel full of people whose lives have not gone the way they’d hoped. But, as the good bard Mellencamp says, “life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”

There is one section, toward the end of the book, that I can still quote from memory: “He would miss her forever. He would never quit hoping … He would never remarry. To his last day, and perhaps beyond, he would regret his own failure of nerve, which was also a failure of imagination, the inability to divine a happy ending.” (p.245)

That last sentence has been my constant companion for the better part of a decade. It’s been a motivator, a reminder akin to “memento mori,” a self-flagellating cudgel. It’s driven me to make decisions I didn’t think I had the strength to make; and it’s echoed in my mind when I didn’t do what I knew I should have. Considered as a ratio of time spent reading to material impact on life, it may even be the most important sentence I’ve ever read. 

It echoes through my mind in times of great change and transition. It’s also a challenge: to have the nerve to imagine good outcomes and act accordingly. 

So I’d recommend July, July to anyone feeling pessimistic about the year or the future. It’s not a balm, per se. It’s not a story where old wounds are healed and where old divides are bridged. Those wounds will always throb; those hurts will never be undone. We are the people we’ve made ourselves into. 

But despite that, even amid the divorce and disappointment, two characters get ready to go out toward the end of the novel.

“‘Maybe we’ll score,’ one remarks. 

“‘Not even maybe,’ said Jan, and took Amy by the hand. ‘Follow me, sweetheart. We’re golden.’” (p.268).

July then. Our once proud, once unstoppable selves. July now. Us, still living, still pushing on and making our way in the world. 

Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood — frankly any Murakami novel — is difficult to recommend. As I get older, more and more moments in his novels find me muttering, “Jesus, dude.” And while I try to avoid letting discomfort get between me and a good work, Murakami does test that commitment. 

But it would be dishonest to not include Norwegian Wood on this list. Frankly, I’m always thinking about this novel in one form or another. In fact, I actively try to reread it every time I enter a new stage in life. Each time, I find a new detail to focus on. 

This year, the thing that strikes me most is that the whole novel is a memory inside a memory. The protagonist, Toru Watanabe, thinks back to being 37 and waiting in a German airport. From there, an orchestral cover of the eponymous song launches him further back into being 18 again. Back into an era of life, obsessed with death. 

For most of the novel, it’s easy to forget this framing. After the introduction, the narration almost never makes reference to it. But there are moments. One night Toru accompanies a friend’s girlfriend, Hatsumi, home — he ponders what je ne sais quois quality makes her so magnetic. The narrative then briefly flashes forward a decade to New Mexico where Toru, interviewing a painter, suddenly understands exactly what it was. He nearly bursts into tears; by this point, Hatsumi has been dead for years. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this storytelling of memory: the ways it’s driven by loose connections, how even moments of elation are tinged or darkened by their outcomes. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s increasingly how I look back on my own life. 

More and more people — intimate acquaintances and friends of friends alike  — have left my own story. The relationship was broken off for some; others seemingly dropped off the face of the earth; and a few have simply died. 

A friend of over a decade changes slowly, as we all do, but the person they’re becoming starts crossing lines. Then they do something they can’t take back. Character: exit stage left. Now you have 11 years of (mostly) good memories; but each time those bubble back up, they’re never quite the same. 

One day you remember spending a whole weekend with them, making your Halloween costumes. You are 14. You are not yet afraid of drinking full-sugar soda. You are with your closest friend. You recall this day another time and they appear older, troubled, weighed down. Now the memory is melancholic. What happened? How did we get here? It’s almost a goodbye. Another time: instead of a child building a metal arm, an amorphous figure stands there; it is the spate of emotions you felt that day. 

Ad nauseum, every memory like this now morphs continuously. 

It’s the process of thinking about our own lives. Maybe not the most poignant reflection, but this is what Norwegian Wood inspires in me. We’ll see what happens next time I read it. 

Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West (1985) by Cormac McCarthy

If Norwegian Wood is a hard book to recommend, then Blood Meridian borders on the impossible. Calling it offensive would be an understatement — and, frankly, would be selling the book short on that front. Its prose can often be difficult to read. And its plot meanders as widely as the northern Mexican deserts are long. 

Blood Meridian is also among the most compelling books that I’ve read. (It does face some stiff competition). There is something about McCarthy’s language, his descriptions, his characters’ sophistry that draws me in. I can flip to any page in the book and be enraptured by its prose. The way McCarthy brings the judge to life… Even knowing his evil, it’s hard not to be captured by his narration. 

More than anything, though, I’m interested in how static the characters are. A large part of what we track in the podcast is how a character changes throughout a novel — what is the author trying to convey with this character’s development?

How, then, do we assess a novel where the characters do not develop? At the start of the novel we meet the kid; and when we say goodbye to him hundreds of pages later, this 30-something is no different from the violent wanderer he was at 14. 

In the interim, there has been great slaughter. Suffering. The murder of the deserving and the innocent alike, much more of the latter than the former. The kid has trekked through states and countries, and hurts and is hurt. 

I think it’s easy to overstate the horribleness of the novel. It is, of course, horrible. But it would be a mistake to linger on that feature for only its own sake. McCarthy does write shocking violence; I believe, though, the point is not simply to shock. He is trying to convey something to the reader through this violence. There is something to be understood in these bloodthirsty, unchanging American bandits. 

Consider War and Peace for a moment. Tolstoy’s work conveys many things to his readers, and for our purposes here let’s consider just one aspect: the story of the Patriotic War, of Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire. It is a history that Tolstoy did not witness. He was not there. Yet Tolstoy’s version of the Patriotic War is perhaps more widely known than historical fact. 

It may be for that reason that Vasily Grossman takes his characters (and readers) to Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in Stalingrad. As the hero-commissar Nikolai Krymov stands there and observes, he thinks briefly to Tolsoy’s depiction of the Patriotic War and attributes to it “such truth and power that it had become the supreme reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago.”*                            

The story overcomes the history. This may sound negative, but I mean that entirely without judgment. It simply is. The story is among humankind’s oldest art forms. Before we tapped on screens, typed on computers or typewriters, scratched with pen or reed stylus…before all of that, we told stories. Oral traditions passed down local histories, hard-won knowledge, entertainment. 

The story (said or written) is not inferior to real history. The problem of real history is that there is too much data, too many perspectives. One event contains as many stories as there were people involved. A story can capture the broad strokes — perhaps even some salient lessons — in a much more digestible fashion. That is how War and Peace operates. It contains no real stories. Yet Pierre and Andrei and Natasha and Nikolai’s stories all capture the feelings of living through the war.**

Blood Meridian occupies a very similar space. If you’ve done some research on the book, you’ll know it is loosely based on historical fact. The Glanton gang really did scalp, rob, brutalize, and murder their way through northern Mexico and parts of the US; the character of the judge is based on a real member of that gang. 

Not many people — barring specialists and hobbyists — think much about the Mexican-American war today.*** Fewer still think about its aftermath. It would be ridiculous to say Blood Meridian occupies a cultural space anywhere near War and Peace. I don’t think it would be ridiculous, though, to say that the novel “creates” history in a similar manner. More people have read it than meaningfully studied the times and places the novel depicts. 

So let me return to my opening question: what is McCarthy trying to convey with a cast of characters who simply are who they are. Their moral character, if any of them possess any, is opaque to us. It is because the characters are mostly beside the point. 

I would pose to you that a reader instead finds the point in Blood Meridian’s vast and inhospitable deserts, in its battlefield massacres, in its abandoned towns, and in its shot-up churches. 

It is a world torn apart by soldiers, torn asunder by an invading American army. It is rife with the politics of land between native peoples, comparatively new power structures, and entrepreneurial sellswords. 

Blood Meridian’s characters are less people than they are archetypes of a sort. We don’t know any of their souls. Their actions serve the story and setting, not the other way around. I don’t mean to imply they lack agency. The kid is a remorseless murderer — yet he does show moral capacity in his actions from time to time. The judge alludes to that in the final pages of the novel. Further analysis of that is beyond the purview of this article, though. 

These characters do have an inner life, it is simply that we are deprived of knowing it. On the other hand, we know their place in history and they do not. The judge points this out to the kid in that same last conversation, saying, “In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can fully comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists.”

Both the characters and the reader understand very little of the novel. Much as the kid spends much of the novel observing, so too does the reader. 

So why am I intrigued by Blood Meridian? Because I can’t stop thinking about it! I want to bring this point home for you, but I just can’t. I am describing only my methodology for understanding the novel. That methodology, by the way, only pertains to how I understand the novel’s characters. 

It’s a story. It conveys a real history to a reader, probably one that will burn brighter than what actually happened. That much I can say with confidence. Beyond that, I still don’t understand it. 

Well, in the meantime, maybe we can take the judge’s command to drink and dance. After all, “Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.”

“Gloria” (2015) by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

(Okay, yes, this one is a play. It has been released in book form, though, so it technically makes the cut.)

I haven’t had much time to go to the theater this year, so I’ve been thinking about my favorites quite a bit.**** One of the foremost is “Gloria,” set at a media magazine in the late aughts. 

It can be hard to describe the play, because so much of the plot hinges on a moment that I won’t spoil for you. Rest assured that it involves a tragedy which the cast then must deal with in their own ways. 

Jacobs-Jenkins takes a hard look at the sometimes destructive, sometimes self-serving, sometimes manipulative ways people react to tragedy in the public sphere. In a time where we have almost instant access to a “story” through TV or the internet, I think it’s worth examining how people tell that story — the details they focus on, the details they de-emphasize or even leave out, and where they place themselves in that story. 

The play tackles the topic with a focus on tell-all memoirs, but I think the themes can be generalized. We live in information societies. Non-insignificant amounts of our economies are dedicated to the creation and distribution of information, both formal and informal. This includes everything from national TV news to an employee complaining about their job online. We don’t experience the world so much as we learn about it through non-stop digital exchange. 

Take this personal example: recently a Pride Center near me posted online about an incident with a former employee at their office. As is common in such statements, they kept the details vague. Obviously I wanted to know more. My girlfriend and I spent the better part of an hour scraping through social media for other perspectives. We found several people posting about the incident (including the person apparently at the center of it all) in both text and video format. 

The various stories didn’t always line up, but they were close enough that we were able to piece together a rough timeline of events. At least — we believe it’s a rough timeline of events. We are dependent on information transmitted from eyewitnesses. How accurate is that information? Well, that’s a matter of opinion. Not every story lined up. We chose to believe only information independently corroborated by several sources. Still, though, that’s a judgment call. Without further investigation, we can only take it on faith that we made the correct judgment. 

Every day, we are bombarded with information: emails, TikToks, instagram reels, news, Tweets, texts. Theoretically, we can learn more today than just about any human who has ever lived on earth. Our ability to learn, though, is still processed through the storyteller’s perspective; therefore that story is also subject to the storyteller’s biases and ignorances. 

A friend of mine, a research scientist, is regularly driven to despair by her cousins showing her “science” TikToks and asking: “Is this true?” (It very rarely is). How many thousands of others do not have a scientist in their lives to fact-check those very videos. 

I’m not saying that we should never believe other people. All human culture and civilization is built on person-to-person information transmission. Our digital information societies can do that on a much greater scale, of course, but it’s the same basic idea. To deny it outright would be to cut off a part of our humanity. 

I do advocate, though, for putting more critical thought into just about everything we learn. That’s why “Gloria” sticks around in my mind so much. The play focuses on the parts of information transmission we don’t see. 

You can find a TL;DR of this entire section in Nana Grizol’s song “Explained Away:” “I thought of who it is whose story gets remembered in the end / And through how many careful tellings does one practice their defense / Some nuances the narrator selectively omits / A once collective memory is destined to forget.” 

It is not a dark conspiracy that all media has a bias. That is a simple fact of existence as a human. We don’t perceive events as a perfect omniscient being; we see them from our own limited perspectives. Then we abridge that information by our own judgment calls. We may even just plain forget something. We may not recognize the context that an event exists within. Maybe that’s for better, maybe that for worse. It is worthwhile to consider that when we encounter a new story, though. 

So, “Gloria” is worthwhile for anyone who consumes media about tragedy or anyone who may encounter tragedy. In short, all of us. It’s worth a read, but, if you can, see it in a black box theater for full effect. 

Endnotes

*Granted, the full context of the phrase (read it below) is not purely an endorsement of Tolstoy’s abilities as a researcher and storyteller. Krymov’s projection of the Patriotic War onto the Great Patriotic War should perhaps be read in the context of how the Soviet state often called upon the Russian Empire’s best-known authors as if drawing the parallels between then and “now” was itself a legitimating force. I do not think that is mutually exclusive from the claim being true. 

“With absolute clarity, Krymov saw in his mind Bald Hills and the old, sick prince.124 The present merged with the past; today’s events were one with what Tolstoy described with such truth and power that it had become the supreme reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago.”

**That being said, I should mention that other authors have tackled this same issue in other ways, too. The story can be better than real history because it is simpler; this also makes it easier for a person to subject a story to distortion. Although distortion may not be a bad thing. Look back at Tim O’Brien, who wrote a pseudo-autobiography of his time as a footsoldier during the American war in Vietnam. He openly admits in the novel that he keeps changing his stories until his audiences finally stop getting caught on bullshit and understand the feeling he’s trying to convey to them. 

Another way to tackle this issue is to go wide and include as many perspectives as possible — see the work of Studs Terkel or Svetlana Alexievich. 

You could identify other ways, but this is not meant to be a comprehensive list. I simply wanted to acknowledge the complexity of the subject beyond this short thinkpiece. 

***This will be doubly true if you are not either American or Mexican. Regardless of your national/ethnic origin, though, I bet you can come up with similarly forgotten conflicts. Not literally forgotten, of course, but the sorts of wars a schoolteacher only mentions briefly. 

**** To be completely honest with you, my favorite play is actually an adaptation of the Audrey Hepburn film Wait Until Dark (1967). I just don’t have too much to say about it, analytically-speaking. Seeing it in a relatively small theater ratchets up the film’s tense atmosphere by a factor of 10.