A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Borderlines

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

CROSSERS

By Philip Caputo

Knopf, 480 pp., $27.95

The enormous malevolence of Sept. 11, 2001, still squats upon the imagination, resisting our efforts to comprehend it. Writers as various as Jay McInerney (“The Good Life”), Jonathan Safran Foer (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”), John Updike (“Terrorist”) and Andre Dubus III (“The Garden of Last Days”) have tried working the events of 9/11 into their novels, but most of these ambitious books were doomed to at least partial failure because our memories of the actual events retain an emotional immediacy that even the most skillfully crafted fiction can't approximate.

But Philip Caputo's “Crossers” succeeds, in part because it's about a man who recognizes that the imagination is inadequate to comprehend evil. For Gil Castle, Caputo's protagonist, the enormity of 9/11 is “beyond grasp – an insane act perpetrated by sane minds.” Castle's wife was aboard the first plane that flew into the World Trade Center towers, and the senselessness of her loss has left him emotionally crippled. After pulling back from the brink of suicide, he decides to withdraw from the sources that feed his memories and his grief – the home where he and his wife lived and the city where he worked and she died. Castle, who has made a fortune on Wall Street, liquidates his holdings, sells his house, and moves to his cousin Blaine Erskine's ranch on the Arizona-Sonora border.

Castle takes this course not out of any mythic urge to move West – in fact, he explicitly rejects it: “It was important in America to move on, to avoid living in the past. That, Castle supposed, made him somewhat un-American. He could not help but live in the past; it clung to him like a second skin.” And so he holes up in an outbuilding on Blaine's ranch, nursing his grief and reading the Roman Stoic Seneca, though he finds Seneca's counsel -- “there is such a thing as moderation in grieving” -- inadequate.

Castle's grief will moderate, though not without the hard wrenching away that produces guilt and pain, because he is right about the inability to avoid living in the past. The irony here is that the past that will intrude upon him is not his own but that of his family. The novel begins with a story from the boyhood of Castle's maternal grandfather, Ben Erskine, who was once described as “the last ember of the true Old West,” and as “an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, and a lawman, [who] put about twelve men in the ground – the ones he didn't put in jail.”

As “Crossers” intermingles the stories of Ben Erskine and Gil Castle, it becomes a novel about the intersection of history and the present, set in a place where, as Blaine's wife observes, things are “like the days of Pancho Villa, except now the bad guys ride Dodge Rams instead of on horses and bang away with AK-47s instead of Winchesters. ... Cell phone on one hip, pistol on the other. The Wild West meets the twenty-first century.” The Erskine family's ranch edges up to the U.S.-Mexican border, a barrier ineffective in stemming the traffic in narcotics and undocumented immigrants. Castle is caught in the crossfire – sometimes literally – between people who run drugs and people who run people, between law enforcement and lawbreakers, and between cultures separated only by a boundary made visible by the barbed-wire fences that deter cattle from crossing, but not human beings.

Caputo gives us characters with credibility and individuality, even though we can see the Western-fiction stereotypes underlying them: the Tenderfoot Easterner, the Rugged Individualist Rancher, the Woman Who's As Tough As Any Man, and so on. There's even a Man With a Mysterious Past known as “The Professor,” who travels between the two countries gathering information. “I can't figure out if you're in this for yourself, if you're a double agent, a triple agent, a quadruple agent, or what,” says one baffled lawman. “I'm an agent of history,” replies The Professor. It takes a skillful writer to avoid falling into hokum with a character like that, but Caputo avoids it -- narrowly. He is a little less successful with his novel's villain, the rapacious drug queen Yvonne Menéndez, whose son reflects, “The only thing he would not put past his mother was cannibalism.” Caputo takes the character so far over the top that the reader probably won't put even that past her.

Similarly, Caputo's plotting has elements of conventional fiction: Castle's healing process is accelerated when he falls in love again, and the novel climaxes in a rush of thriller-type action. But the book manages to rise above its generic elements. Without any ripped-from-the-headlines artifice, “Crossers” gives us an intense, clear-sighted account of the times in which we live, of 9/11, the Iraq war, the “war on drugs” and the conflict over illegal immigration. Caputo succeeds in showing how our contemporary paranoia and homeland insecurity are rooted in the inescapable past.

The Proust Project, Day 8

Where this began
Day 7


Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 90-102.

The narrator is introduced to the works of a writer named Bergotte "by a friend of mine older than I whom I greatly admired, Bloch." Unfortunately, the rather pretentious and affected Bloch is not admired by the rest of the family. The narrator's grandfather is concerned that Bloch is "a Jew, which would not have displeased him in principle -- even his friend Swann was of Jewish extraction -- had he not felt that it was not from among the best that I had chosen him." His barometer-watching father is perturbed by Bloch's indifference to the weather. His grandmother suspects Bloch of insincerity when he wipes away tears after hearing that she was "a little indisposed." And when he arrives for lunch "an hour and a half late covered with mud," Bloch, instead of apologizing, proclaims that he knows "nothing about the use of those ... pernicious and insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella." But the final straw is Bloch's telling the narrator "that he had heard most positively that my great-aunt had had a wild youth and had been known to be a kept woman." The narrator, incapable of keeping secrets, tells his parents with the result that Bloch is banished and the narrator's tattling ends their friendship.

But the narrator's obsession with Bergotte continues. He becomes so taken with the writer's observations and opinions "that, when by chance I happened to encounter in one of his books a thought that I had already had myself, my heart would swell as though a god in his goodness had given it back to me, had declared it legitimate and beautiful." So he's overcome when Swann informs him that he knows Bergotte quite well and would even ask him to inscribe the narrator's book. The narrator learns that La Berma is Bergotte's favorite actress and that Swann's daughter is great friends with Bergotte, which puts the narrator "on the point of falling in love with" Mlle. Swann.
Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest. Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face.

In these pages we also learn a little more about Swann's mannerisms, including his adoption of an ironic tone of voice, "as though he had put it between quotation marks, seeming not to want to take responsibility for it," when expressing an opinion.
Until then his horror of ever expressing a serious opinion had seemed to me a thing that must be elegant and Parisian and that was the opposite of the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I also suspected that it was a form of wit in the social circles in which Swann moved, where, reacting against the lyricism of earlier generations, they went to an extreme in rehabilitating those small, precise facts formerly reputed to be vulgar, and proscribed "fine phrases." But now I found something shocking in this attitude of Swann's toward things. It appeared that he dared not have an opinion and was at his ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information.