Methuselah's Children

Methuselah's Children Robert Heinlein 160pp.

I’ll open this review with a brief confession that I feel I must make-I really, really love pulp fiction. There, I said it. In my mind it takes a tremendous amount of skill as a writer to create a good piece of pulp writing, even though it may seem otherwise. If the author falls back on conventions of the genre too heavily, then his narrative will look weak. But if the story is too narrative-focused, with the genre lurking in the background only as a means of understanding the text in relation to other books, then it isn’t pulp. It’s a problem, and a fascinating one.

Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children is a marvelous jaunt down the dusty reminisces of Golden Age Science Fiction. Through the course of the book we follow a set of families who, by virtue of selective breeding, have developed themselves to live for centuries. They are, in due course, imprisoned for the outside world’s want of their longevity, and through a marvelously executed plan, the families make their escape into the vast reaches of space.

One of the best choices made in the entire composition of this book was Heinlein’s decision to send his long-lived protagonists out into outer-space, where their only interactions would be with themselves or with utterly alien minds. On one level, I found this to be a little frustrating, the kind of knowledge, foresight, and nuance that a two-hundred year old man would bring to a discussion with someone who only has their threescore and ten would be amazing to read. However, Heinlein is not simply aware of this potential, he even lampshades it in some of Slayton Ford’s internal dialogue prior to just such a conversation. It is interesting, in the light of this, that Heinlein’s protagonist for the novel, the tough and gruff Lazarus Long rarely behaves in a way outside that of a ‘normal’ human. In the end, Heinlein makes the wiser choice as an author to avoid this interaction, as there is effectively no way he could produce it with the kind of clarity and narrative weight the occasion deserves.

Naturally, being Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children contains a section decrying the evils of collectivization and triumphing the immortal strength and power of the human spirit alone. Squarely in the middle of the book, one of the alien races who take the long-lived humans in initiate Slayton into their religious system. It turns out, spoilers incoming, that this initiation is a revelation of collective servitude to a higher, free-minded species. Slayton’s brain simply rejects the process lock, stock, and barrel, leaving him a shaken shell of a man for quite some time.

Later, when the long-lived humans meet this master race, they find the species to be even more communal than the one who worships them. Their lives are lived in a mutual community of spirit, sharing consciousness between multiple bodies. Sure enough, one of the long-lived humans casts their lot for immortality with this mutuality, and the rest of the humans lose themselves in mourning for her. Fortunately, however, Heinlein keeps his social polemic to the background of the text for the majority of the book, choosing instead to focus on the family’s own ways of relating to one another and the outside world through the lens of their extreme longevity.

Books like Methuselah’s Children are valuable, most of all as a short form dedicated to the working out and exploration of one single idea. While the narrative possibilities within Heinlein’s plot have a great deal of energy left in them for further writing (A voluminous backstory only hinted at within the novel and the wider consequences of the long-lived protagonists’ return to earth stand out as particularly interesting examples.) Yet despite all these possibilities left dangling in front of us like the appetizers you decide not to order, the novel wraps up to a satisfying and compelling conclusion. Heinlein was indisputably a master of the short novel as a form, and Methuselah’s Children is just one more piece of proof for that fact.

Would I recommend Methuselah’s Children? Yes.

Score: 3.6/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

Paper Towns

Paper Towns John Green 320pp.

John Green’s Paper Towns is a wonderful, pithy exploration of the way we view our friends and the people we interact with. The novel tells the story of Quentin Jacobsen, a somewhat nerdy high school student, chasing after Margo Roth Spiegelman, the love of his life.

At the risk of calling too much attention to the way I am writing these reviews, the second sentence up there is exactly the issue that John Green is exploring in this novel. When I portrayed Quentin and Margo to you, I did so by epitomizing them in a very brief and one-dimensional description. While this is entirely understandable in the case of priming a review through a presentation of the characters, it becomes troublesome when we apply this in real life. Quentin spends the entire book understanding Margo through a variety of lenses, picturing her in a sequence of different, equally inaccurate simplifications.

This development of Quentin’s view of Margo is paralleled neatly as he follows after her disappearance through a series of clues and riddles. Every possible piece of information that Quentin can find which suggests a possible motive or destination for Margo’s disappearance shortly before the end of her high school career is analyzed, turned over, and twisted about. Dozens of paper Margos come and go through the course of the novel, none of which accurately portray the woman they so desperately desire to represent.

In some ways, this chase draws comparisons to novels like The DaVinci code, at the very least through a structural lens; but the essential nature of the novel causes it to stand apart. Paper Towns bears more resemblance to a philosophical tract than an action-mystery thriller. Green’s writing does lend itself to those comparisons with hints at suicide to raise the stakes, but not for a moment do those implications seem substantiated by the information in the text.

Paper Towns was a very enjoyable book to read, an excellent blurring of the lines between Young Adult fiction, which it is undoubtedly marketed as, and a “real” novel. The nuance of character development, and frankly even the specific aspect of human nature which Green chooses to explore push the novel out of the Young Adult category for me, and I think they problematize any easy definitions of either genre for any reader.

Would I recommend Paper Towns? Yes.

Score: 4.2/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Had I not checked it out from the library, absolutely.

-DFTBA, Mr. Cheddar.

Tristessa

Tristessa Jack Kerouac 96pp.

Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa, while not functioning very well as a novella, provides a tremendous insight into Kerouac’s spritual life. The  book is a lengthy mediation on his relationship with Tristessa, a morphine junky in Mexico City. With no subtlety or obfuscation, Kerouac wants to portray himself as a hero coming into Tristessa’s broken, hellish existence in Mexico city and lifting her up into his idealized life as a religious wanderer.Through this angle, Tristessa paints a perfect picture of his understanding of Buddhism and how he imagines himself acting through that. 

On its surface, Tristessa is an exploration of Tristessa’s life and the society she lives in in Mexico City. But this is not Kerouac’s interest. Rather, he uses this as a lens through which he can portray his own interest in Buddhism, combined with his upbringing in a staunchly Roman Catholic family. What this lens shows to the reader is Kerouac’s twist on Buddhism, into a salvific religion, by which he could bring his friends out of their sordid lives and into a world of perfect joy.

This frankly demeaning view of the world works well with Tristessa, and we see Kerouac jaunting around Mexico city with her, idealizing this woman into a perfect archon of beauty and joy. The comparison goes so far as to imply that Tristessa herself is a type of the Virgin Mary, reborn in the filth of Mexico City. Kerouac honestly believes that through her experience and living with her, he could attain to enlightenment and lift her up at the same time.

We see this syncretism of Catholicism and Buddhism at its finest when Kerouac and Tristessa are in front of an altar to the Virgin, at which, after lighting a cigarette from an altar candle, Kerouac makes a prayer to the Virgin “‘Excuse mué ma ‘Dame’”-making special emphasis on Dame because of the Mother of Buddhas.” This combination of religious imagery pops up all throughout the text, as Kerouac constantly equivocates Tristessa and the Virgin/Damema, fusing the two in his mind into an idealized angelic figure perfectly pure amidst the squalor of morphine in Mexico City.

In the course of the novella, Kerouac goes so far as to decide that Tristessa “doesn’t need saving,” he eventually comes back to Mexico City a year later, and sees her living in the same state he left her. After a week or so of bumming around the city and realizing that he is playing second fiddle to the morphine in her life, he packs up and moves on with his life, leaving Tristessa as a perfect icon in his mind.

While the gender politics in Tristessa are very problematic: Kerouac has to be the big hero coming in to Mexico to either lift up and save or abase himself and worship at the feet of this idealized woman; the novella remains a wonderful crystallization of his jazz prose. The sentences roll together in a carefully metered casual rhythm, painting the city in rich pictures. On the whole, the novella provides an enjoyable evening’s read.

Would I recommend Tristessa? Yes.

Score: 3.8/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

Essentials of Christian Theology

Essentials of Christian Theology William C. Placher, ed. 422pp.

William C. Placher has put together a marvelous collection of essays in Essentials of Christian Theology. The book is organized as an exploration of Christian thought from a variety of angles. Curiously, the text’s strongest aspect also calls attention to its great weakness. 

Essentials of Christian Theology lacks a strong central viewpoint to organize the text. By selecting his sources from such a wide variety of theological traditions, Placher has put together a phenomenal introduction to the breadth of thought in the discipline. As such, it is easy to finish Essentials and feel ready to dive into more focused, single point-of-view texts. I appreciated this greatly, being given an understanding of the language used in Theological discourse, as well as a smattering of some of the issues currently being tossed around by theologians was a wonderful entry into the field. This does come up a touch weak for me at the end of the book, when I was given a wide series of differing views, all presented equally and in constant dialogue with each other. I felt that I had more questions to answer and resolve than a greater understanding and answer on any single issue, though perhaps that is the point.

At this point, I’m going to end the review for this book, I’ve tossed around about a dozen different ways of discussing some of the chapters, but I really don’t feel that I can do them justice. So, Essentials of Christian Theology is a great introduction to the field, but a little hard to walk away from feeling confident in any one viewpoint.

Would I recommend Essentials of Christian Theology? Yes.

Score: 3.7/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar

A New Model of the Universe

A New Model of the Universe P.D. Ouspensky 554pp.

Throwing this review back to 1913, P.D. Ouspensky presents a very enjoyable reaction to, among a wide variety of other topics, Darwin’s theories of evolution. But I’m getting ahead of myself slightly. A New Model of the Universe is a precursor to some of the late 20^th and early 21^st century literature on magic. Ouspensky presents his view of understanding the universe as a vast and mystical system, true meaning hiding behind the veil of the widely known sciences in a similar manner to the ancient Pythagoreans’ understanding of reality through mysticism masked in the guise of bland mathematics.

Ouspensky discusses this view of reality through a wide variety of instantiations in common culture at the time, ranging from mathematics, with an utter fascination with four-dimensional space. This thought is, frankly, really just amusing to read. Rather than spoiling the joy of his prose, I’ll let Ouspensky speak for himself,

If the fourth dimension exists, one of two things is possible. Either we ourselves possess the fourth dimension, I.e. are beings of four dimensions, or we possess only three dimensions and in that case do not exist at all.

If the fourth dimension exists while we possess only three, it means that we have no real existence, that we exist only in somebody’s imagination, and that all our thoughts, feelings and experiences take place in the mind of some other higher being, who visualises us. We are but products of his mind and the whole of our universe is but an artificial world created by his fantasy.

If we do not want to agree with this, we must recognise ourselves as beings of four dimensions.

But the mathematical fancy in which Ouspensky indulges is not nearly the greatest part of the book. No, that comes from his reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Ouspensky holds that Darwin was utterly correct to understand the development of organisms over time, but that he was subtly off the mark. Or, in a more charitable reading of Ouspensky’s criticism, Darwin consciously masked a mystical truth in the guise of science.

Rather than biological development through time, Ouspensky believes in a mystical development of mankind through a progressively deeper understanding of reality. It is through throwing back the veils of reality that a mind grows into a wider and wider understanding and a greater purpose and truth in his life. This philosophy is expounded at length through the course of the entire book, applying a certain form of hermeneutics best likened to literary criticism to every text and symbolic object Ouspensky can lay his narrative gaze on.

A New Model of the Universe comes dustily forward from the cusp of modernity. Just as new genres of purely scientific writing were beginning to be widely published and disseminated, there was a corresponding intellectual restlessness. Notions of humanity’s place in the universe were being shifted about and questioned, a trend whose effects we are still feeling to this day. Reacting to the weirdness of, at the time, modern science (and it is important to remember how utterly weird and unsettling evolution was to people in the late nineteenth century), by reading it in the manner of secret knowledge gained through mystical cults has a resemblance to the modern phenomenon of conspiracy theories. There is an exhilaration and a distinction to being one of the enlightened few who have pierced the mystery and see the world for what it is, unlike the unsuspecting sheep who look at contrails as merely airplane exhaust. Ultimately, however, this line of thought is at best unreliable, though mostly benign. Ouspensky clings tenaciously to a method of literary criticism and textual interaction best understood from the  late renaissance into the early Enlightenment era, twisting about the convulutions and upheavals in the wake of new science.

Would I recommend A New Model of the Universe? To read? Yes. To take seriously? Not so much.

Score: 3.2/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Difficult to say, on the one hand I really enjoyed reading it, but on the other, I don’t think I will come back to it.

-Mr. Cheddar

A Delay

Sorry about the break in posts, NaNoWriMo is kicking me in the behind. The good news is that I have ~16,000 words to go and should be done by Thanksgiving. You can look forward to more reviews after Thanksgiving. 

-Mr. Cheddar

The Town and the City

The Town and the City Jack Kerouac 499pp.

Jack Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City is a marvelous entry into Kerouac’s work. It provides a great vehicle for understanding how Kerouac’s novels work both from a critical perspective and from just the point-of-view of just simply reading them. In brief, The Town and the City follows the varied lives of the Martin family in the years leading up to and shortly after World War 2. Every book Kerouac wrote is a fictionalized account of his life, and with the right key, one can translate almost every character in the book into a real person from his life.

The Town and the City has a few problems, mostly in that none of the female characters get a reasonable amount of narrative space. Ruth, Liz, and Rose, as well as a spate of girlfriends pass through the pages, interacting with the Martin sons, and then drifting off into deeper recesses of the narrative. Marguerite Martin gets a slight reprieve from this, Kerouac loved his mother and features her extremely prominently in his novel. Kerouac gives his mother a vastly more central role in the book, as a substantial part of the pair around whom the family revolved, though I must admit that she is still confined almost exclusively to domesticity.

I can, however, set aside these faults in the novel largely on the grounds that, while on the surface it is a rambling book about the entire Martin family’s lives, in reality it is a book about Jack Kerouac’s adolescence reflected through a prism of three men. Joe Martin is the working Kerouac, the traveling, wild image he projects of himself at times as a working-class hero. Francis Martin is, at some level, the Kerouac of soft intellectual ruminations, brooding in the garret. In truth, however, the real stand-in for Kerouac is Peter Martin.

Everything in Peter Martin’s life, from the football, to the Merchant Marine, to the experiences in New York City are directly culled from Kerouac’s own life. I think that this is a really important understanding to go into this book with, understanding that Kerouac was not simply a refined, effete writer standing on his soapbox writing his novels about the world. He was an athlete, however much or little that actually says about his character. He was able to go to Columbia and study how to be a writer because he got a full-ride scholarship to play football. It’s easy to lose sight of this in studying Kerouac’s work, but I think that going into his novels with an early understanding of who the man was in reality is important before studying who he portrayed himself to be in fiction.

In The Town and the City, Kerouac writes with breathtaking grandeur, sweeping across the plains and forests of New England with Russian magnificence. Reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Galsworthy, Kerouac drifts through the the lives of his fictionalized family growing up, growing old, and growing apart in the malaise of the 1940’s.

Would I recommend The Town and the City? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Score: 4.6/5

Would I keep this on my shelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar