Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

Title: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Author: Tennessee Williams      

Publish date: 1940 – first performance 1955

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Holy moly. Although I’m now sweating with irritation I’m glad I re-read that one. I don’t think a teenager in the 80s got a great deal out of it.

For those of you who have completely forgotten it (like me) and are left only with vague images of Elizabeth Taylor looking young and black-haired-white-frocked, the story is a squabble between members of a Mississippi cotton plantation owner’s family, essentially over money. He’s dying and no-one wants to tell him, everyone wants in on his will – which isn’t made. The play sticks to the Aristotelian unities but that’s pretty much it as far as application of any normal or accepted standards of writing are concerned. And the thing apparently won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I didn’t even know there was one.

I started gagging right at the start with Maggie’s histrionic evil fist-biting routines, which Williams insists on finding charming. The stage directions are insane. They go on for so long you really wonder why the hell he didn’t write a novel or just get onto a soap box instead. The dialogue is shit – everyone has the same diction, only more or less of it, and we’re reckoning here on southern drawl interspersed with out-of-place formal or literary vocabulary to carry us through. I guess in productions the actors have to make it their own, gloss over some things, accent others. On the page it’s infantile.

But you keep reading and start getting over the initial gut-reaction shock of the insane objectification and downgrading of women. It’s hard to do this because Williams buys into it so much himself, you hate everyone on stage, and the playwright.

Then you start to look. Hang on, it’s not only the women being forced to beg and being incapacitated. Brick is isolated for the mere thought he might have homosexual tendencies – in fact he rejects any possibility of it in himself and would burn it down fast as any of the other characters. Big Mamma is demeaned for being fat. Gooper’s rejected for being sober, Brick is rejected for being drunk. Mae is rejected for having children, Maggie is rejected for having none. Everyone (apart from Brick, who’s a spoiled brat and is currently only interested in the bottom of the bourbon bottle) wants money, because they think it’ll lead to something good. And the fount of this money, Big Daddy, is left entirely on his own while they break the news of his cancer to his wife. He’s rejected because he’s a good as dead.

I remembered an internet-circulated mini-video I saw just yesterday, with the title ‘Objectification of women hurts everyone’. In which they proceed to list the ‘type’ of woman it hurts – mothers, daughters, friends, grandmothers. Further casting pigeonholes and roles onto the very people they’re trying to support, and completely ignoring the fact that objectification of women also hurts men, and vice versa. Objectification of men – as breadwinners, as strong, as whatever typecast you put on them – deprives women of those roles as well as dooming men into their allotted pigeonholes. We still can’t grasp this. We still buy into all the advertising and the commercialism and the nothing-is-good-enough that Williams was so sick of he wrote this bananas play nearly eighty years ago. Sick of but still part of it, trying to tear it off as the characters are without knowing what or where it is. Like Big Daddy’s cancer, ‘it’s past the knife’. The rawness of render and uncontrolled frustration channel themselves directly past the characters, turning the whole play into a soapbox where the playwright does an unconscious show-not-tell on the state of society which, alarmingly, seems not to have changed from the 1940s.

I can’t give this moose-hoofs. Glad I re-read it but would prescribe it with a health warning attached. Take as necessary. 

Breath

Title: Breath

Author: Tim Winton

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton / Penguin

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 9870241015308

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This book is an object lesson to writers: superb prose and meticulous, visceral observations are not enough to make a good novel.

The story is not so much a coming of age as an explanation of the ongoing issues of a character, even though by the time we get to the ongoing issues they’re pretty much an epilogue and we don’t care anyway. Set in a fictional surfing community in WA in the 70s, the retrospective narrator ‘Pikelet’ and his daredevil friend ‘Loonie’ become surfing disciples to the surfing legend ‘Sandy’. (You guessed it, everyone has nicknames.) Relationships form and jar, adrenaline is pumped, and endless dangerous waves are surfed. Through it all runs the theme of respiration, from diving to sexual asphyxiation to drowning to sleep apnoea.

Plus point:

•         Incredibly delicate use of language. Forceps precision application of words to describe sensations.

Minus points:

•         Plot is carefully constructed and woven into the theme of breathing, but utterly lacks drive. It’s one incident after another which are supposed to ramp up the tension but because the incidents lead no-where, they don’t. The main ‘dramatic twists’ in the story we’ve seen coming from the first few chapters.
•          We don’t give a rat’s whisker about the characters because they don’t about themselves. NONE of the characters like themselves. The narrator admires some of them, with reserve. No-one shows any particular affection for the narrator. An utter lack of empathy ensues. You just wish they would all die faster.

The novel is depressing on so many levels, but to me mostly because it’s such a crying waste to use such great technique to so little avail. It’s like drowning lobster tail in soy sauce and chili, or burning a fillet mignon into a hockey puck. Should never be done.

More could be said, but I've lost the will to live. 

Two moose hoofs up out of five, only for the verbal magic.

A Mercy

Title: A Mercy

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Knopf

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 978-0-307-26423-7

Book quote:

‘These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. (…) Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow.’

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A discussion on the theme of subjugation, possession and protection in late 17^th century America, this novel is like cobweb: both filamentous and strong.

The main timeline of the plot is a few days’ duration, while Florens (a Portuguese-African slave girl) ventures off on her own to find help for her mistress, who is afflicted with smallpox. The chapters alternate POV between the main characters in the book, and through their recollections and associative thinking a larger picture of their narratives before and after is depicted.

Many readers say that the central theme is slavery. It’s not. It’s oppression across the board, how people create their own ‘sanity’ within the confines of their individual circumstances, and above all how they communicate with each other. Florens is docile and eager to please – later terrifyingly independent when circumstances change. Sorrow creates her version of sanity inside seeming madness. Jacob within his hubristic new house. Lina within her re-creation of herself as an all-dependable fount of calm and knowledge. Their chapters send out filaments to criss-cross each other’s narratives like hyphae, intricate and fertilizing. Eventually, with the glue that binds them together gone, their connections dissolve like so much candy-floss in water. The tenor of the novel seems to intimate that despite the transitory nature of their connections, the depth of their emotions at the time etches significance into the bond that exists after dissolution like seared light on the retina.

From the Blacksmith down – so stylized he doesn’t even get a name - you could say the characters are cut-outs. Arranged for the purposes of plot and significance, tokens as representative as chess pieces. The white mail-order bride, the Protestant tradesman, the Popish ignoramuses, the black slave girl, the Noble Savage with flowing hair, the brutish slave trader, even an Irish (?) pirate’s daughter. Through the confines of their place in the plot, and their place in their circumstances, they sing a cantata more poetry than prose. They’re stuck there, sending out tentacles, and it’s a mesmerizing process to behold.

The breakdown of the relationships and their hyphae reflects the isolation that ultimately each character, and by inference every member of humanity, suffers. The most poignant isolation and communication breakdown is between Florens and her mother. Florens seeks her mother’s ‘answer’ throughout the novel but will never find it. Only the reader sees from above, only the reader can weep at the wasted struggles and pitiful, mismatched desires.

Five Moose-Hoofs up. Only set aside a good chunk of a day when you intend to read it because you won’t be able to put it down.

The Catcher In The Rye

Title: The Catcher In The Rye

Author: D. J. Salinger

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Publish date: 1951

ISBN: 9782253009788

Book quote:

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” 

I re-read this recently after a gap of three decades or so, and a prompting from comments to the effect of What is the point of this book, why would I want to read about some crappy dude who’s hopeless at everything and screws up his life in every possible way? To be fair, my only recollection of the novel from last reading was a vague sensation of annoyance.

For starters, what comes out of Holden’s mouth and transpires in action is certainly crappy, but there’s no doubt we’re meant to have empathy for him – precisely because of his empathy for others. It’s this, and the inability to bear the monstrous injustice he starts to be aware of as he grows out of the viewfinder of childhood, that makes him turn away from the painful sight and start poking his finger in his eye or whatever moronic consequential action he decides on next. He can’t stand to see a stranger snubbed in the street, or a roommate he doesn’t like being excluded (even it’s for precisely the same reasons he dislikes them for). Certainly not even entertain the idea of a young girl whom he likes being treated in a way that – well, in a way that boys tend to treat girls. The moral struggle and culpability of not being able to right all (or any) of the wrongs in the world is an ongoing issue for any human with a conscience. The post-war environment of the early 1950s and the state of being an adolescent serve here as nexus for this anxiety to coalesce against. It’s not, however, a unique situation.

Critics sometimes cite the ‘shocking’ vocabulary as a milestone in literary freedom of expression. The only shocking thing about the vocabulary is the head-bangingly monotonous repetition. Whether Salinger set out to gain profanity-notoriety-points or whether he was merely using the inarticulacy as a show-not-tell for the powerlessness of Holden’s emotional state is a moot point. For sure, something written this self-indulgently and carelessly would never see past the inside of a garbage bin in an editor’s office these days. If writers today wanted to gain the same effect we’d have to use a whole heap of other tactics to keep the reader interested and validate the page count. The flat-footedness is accentuated in portions where other narrators come in. Strangely, they all have similar diction – minus some profanity, perhaps. It’s probably because of the shock-value that the volume ever got published. Moral mores are some of the hardest obstacles to transcend and often they’re so ingrained we don’t even know they’re restraining us. So I guess good on you Salinger. Does that make it a classic though? No, I don’t think so. It makes it a historical piece, worthy of note. To hold it up as a valid literary example to generations of today is erroneous.

It’s only towards the end that we’re told of the event that started Holden on his downwards spiral: the suicide of a boy in the first school he was expelled from. The boy jumps to his death one night having borrowed Holden’s polo neck jumper. The jumper and not knowing why he’d wanted to borrow it connect Holden indecipherably and unstatedly to culpability for the death. The still relatively new field of psychology that Salinger explores through this plot and structure is clumsy by today’s standards but as an early conscious assay in literature it probably has a laudable place. Not one we need to linger at.

In short, yes, there is a point to Catcher In The Rye. It says, take time to bear with obnoxious moody teenagers (and people in general) because they might well be trying their best to reconcile themselves to an insane world full of cruelty, and figuring out how to respond. Today, we’d try to say this on a budget of about 1,500 words max. If you wanted longer, you’d have to make it a damned sight more interesting.

Two Moose Hoofs up out of five – both for historical value.

The White Tiger

Title:  The White Tiger

Author: Aravind Adiga

Publisher: Atlantic Books             

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 978-1-84354-722-8

Book Quote:

‘There are three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in. …. At the tea shop, the gossip grew furious. … Like eunuchs discussing the Kaka Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.’

This novel is a polariser. A glance round the review circuit will show fans raving at the satirical wit and galloping pace, and detractors growling at the unfavourable portrayal of the poor. The unsavoury exploits of the anti-hero, and the liberties with political and social facts that Adiga is supposed to have taken. The novel won the Booker for 2008 and is (unbelievably) a debut novel. Debut novel! Holy smoke.

Who is the novel’s target audience? I would say, people like me. We have no idea about India or Indian politics, or customs. Any small knowledge we have is third hand. The acrylic-colour sketches of life are a vivid backdrop to the story for us – intriguing but not the main focus. The human interaction and the social structure constructs a much more solid level for us to be guided around. The ‘coop’ is at first glance an entirely alien system of populace management. But as we look closer, and closer, it all starts translating into something much more familiar. Frighteningly similar to ‘Western’ culture control methods. You do something because it’s expected of you. If you don’t do it, you’re bad. People in power have exemption passes for doing bad things because well, how would anything get done otherwise?

Many readers drop by the wayside because they can’t take the ‘savage’ humour. Why is it often described as ‘savage’? Too painful? Too nasty? Too near the bone? Or great because it is all of these? The function of the satire is of course utilizing humour to speak the unspeakable. This overarching concept is verbalized wthin the novel in the recurring phrase (originating from Pinky Madam), ‘What a fucking joke.’ Balram says: ‘But to be called a murderer by the police? What a fucking joke.’ Pretty much the nub of the argument.

However both fans and detractors tend to miss the point. Aravind doesn’t describe India. He’s describing an imbalance of social acceptability and culpability which is global, and seemingly inbuilt to human nature.  He’s drawing attention to moral hypocrisy in a way that is too visceral for many, and too apparently localized for immediate transparency. Think Animal Farm. Without a doubt we’re meant to make the literary connection, with the insistent repetition of The Stork, The Raven, and The Buffalo and The Mongoose as character substitution names. They’re even called ‘The Animals’ collectively. Yet I haven’t seen a single reviewer mention this. The local colour is there for structure and interest. The story’s purpose is moral analogy, not a comment on India per se.

Five Moose-hoofs up. This one was a jaw-dropper. 

The Strays

Title: The Strays

Author: Emily Bitto

Publisher: Affirm Press

Publish date: 2014

This author has two problems here:

1. They are working out their own doubts through the medium of this story. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but in this case, they’re worried about whether their writing is interesting enough and whether they’re talented enough. Which automatically makes for boring writing, even if the fears are erroneous.
2. Their editors failed them.

The narrator Lily is a single child from an average family, who’s semi-adopted into a fledgling artist colony. Apparently she finds the whole experience terribly bohemian and enviably, talentedly shocking. Some bad things happen along the way. The end.

The story could have been fine. There’s nothing better or worse about choosing this particular setting. But Lily in her constant struggle to validate her vicarious existence through the Trentham family simply serves as a puppet mouthpiece for the author, who has decided that anything so out-there as an artistic community with paedophilic tendencies has got to be worth a second look. Bitto hasn’t grasped the concept that there is more pathos and empathy to be had in the spilling of a glass of milk than in the explosion of several galaxies, given the right storytelling.

For the story to have worked, Lily would have had to do one of two things:

• Validated herself independently of the Trenthams
• Been more of an unreliable narrator and transparently weak, so the author and reader could talk over her head

She does neither.

In addition to this, the jumping about in time, particularly towards the end, ensures dissipation of whatever tension there was well in advance of the close of the novel. The relief when the whole lamentable dirge is over is immense.

It’s a shame, because Bitto has a nice turn of phrase and a fine hand for painting pictures. Were her editors more on the ball, they would have encouraged a calmer approach that played to her strengths of observation and given in less to uncontrolled histrionics. Hopefully this debut novel will boost confidence enough (having for some reason won the Stella Prize) for fears to be allayed and something more sensible in the future. There is scope.

I do have one burning question, though. How, in this world of The Strays, does one roast duck feed a gathering of at least 11 people? In my house it will feed three at the very most. If I knew the secret, my housekeeping money would last till October on January’s budget. There are three explanations I can think of:

1.  Evan Trentham possesses Christ-like carving and serving capabilities.
2. The family lives mainly by photosynthesis and only sits at table for show. This option would validate some of the other household arrangements.
3. There is a species of duck the size of a large turkey.

Or there’s a fourth possibility. The author and the editors were sloppy. Here and elsewhere. Better luck next time, maybe.

One weak wave of a Moose-hoof up out of five.

Repulsion Thrust

Title: Repulsion Thrust

Author: Magdalena Ball

Publisher: BeWrite Books, UK

Publish date: 2009

ISBN: 978-906609-30-6

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A curious book of poetry, which in the aftertaste reminds me more of John Donne than anything I can put my finger on. Replete with images and analogies from science, it tilts its gaze at the world into an unfamiliar angle, raising brows with facets and reflections unexpectedly apposite. Fragility, love and existence are measured in planetary distances, atoms, chemical reactions, quantum particles and scales of evolution. A metaphysical bent tuned neatly to our age, plucking harp strings with latex gloves.

Well worth the read and slow digestion - and not just because I know the author. Four Moose Hoofs up.