It's About Like, Art and Stuff

Reading Gilead last week is now seeming eerily prescient.

By Nightfall, which I've written about before and was sad to finish last night, is in many ways hugely different than Gilead. For one, it's set in present-day Manhattan, and follows the travails of a rather well-off married couple, he an art dealer, she a magazine editor. So yes, a far cry from the spiritual musings of last week.

But in other ways, the books are surprisingly complementary. In Gilead, an older man questions the motives of his best friend's younger son (himself middle-aged) who reappears in town after a long absence. In By Nightfall, the story picks up when Mizzy (short for "The Mistake"), younger brother of protagonist Peter Harris' wife Rebecca, appears in the city, having "recovered" from a problem with addiction and looking for a job "in the arts." Like the narrator of Gilead, Peter is distrustful of (and yet also enamored of) Mizzy. He simultaneously wants to improve him and be rid of him, and perhaps most importantly, he's concerned—obsessed, even—with what those conflicting emotions mean. (To clarify, the books are hugely different in many other ways, not least of which is Peter's mild attraction to Mizzy).

Though I loved By Nightfall on several levels—writing, setting, dialogue—the book's true strength is its characters, who seem so effortlessly real that I keep expecting to run into one of them on the 4 train. Peter and Rebecca as the comfortable married couple, Mizzy as the wayward and frivolous 20-something, Bea (the Harris' daughter) as the malcontent young female, whose rebellion takes the form of leaving her parents' SoHo loft for a job in a Boston hotel bar. (Again, the connection with Gilead: What is one to make of their daughter fleeing New York for a mundane existence hundreds of miles away. And how does said flight reflect on one's attempts at parenting?)

A Sober Addendum

This is what I did BEFORE I wrote my book review.

So it would appear that beer has quite an influence on my a) perception of spirituality and b) choice in vocabulary. In particular, after tossing back six drinks at a happy hour with friends last night, I proceeded to come home and write a rather angry review of Gilead that features no fewer than four instances of the word "beautiful" and a sentence that includes both "bequeath" and "kin." I am a rather verbose drunk.

I feel in retrospect that I was a little harsh on Gilead (or maybe I'm feeling residual guilt about having panned a Pulitzer Prize winner). So to make amends, and reiterate how impressed I was by the book's language, if not its subject matter, here are my favorite quotes from Gilead. (Full disclosure: I have a rather neurotic habit of dog-earing the bottom of pages when a particular quote resonates with me, so perhaps sharing these lines would be a way of turning what is otherwise a literary quirk into useful blog fodder).

Enjoy!

"A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine."

"I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books."

"Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time."

"These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice."

"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

Oh, God...

Confession time: I didn't care for Gilead.

Now I know what you're thinking: The book won a Pulitzer, how bad can it be? Well I'm glad you asked. Gilead isn't bad, not at all. Rather, it's one of the more beautiful things I've ever read, filled with lines that address spirituality in a way uncommon among modern literature, in a way meant to resonate with people who have themselves considered the implications of being religious in the modern era. In fact, I can't emphasize enough how truly beautiful and poignant the language in Gilead is.

Unfortunately, no amount of beautiful language could have saved this book for me. Rather, my objection lies with the subject matter. Gilead is told from the point of view of a priest, spending his dying days writing a letter to his rather young son, a letter intended to bequeath upon his kin all the various thoughts and suggestions he might have otherwise shared in fatherhood. Alone, this sounds charming. In practice, Gilead is an exercise in religion, and more specifically in what it might mean for a religious man in the 20th century to decide which parts of his life and thoughts are worth sharing with his child. Lest this still sound appealing, for me personally it read a lot like a father describing to his son his impression of unicorns, and how their supposed presence had affected his outlook on life. Which is to say I found it almost entirely irrelevant.

I suppose it would be logical at this point to clarify my own personal atheism, and why it may have perhaps affected my opinion of this book. Critics' praise of Gilead labels it as one of the more accurate and insightful books on spirituality, but to read Gilead as an atheist is like bearing witness to a debate over whether God's beard is white or gray, which is to say it's nonsense. Despite a 250-page attempt to remove myself from the validity of the subject matter, I remained caught up in the book's central elements--the opinions of a rural pastor some 50 years ago--which felt wholly irrelevant to me. Even as I was able to appreciate the beautiful simplicity of Marilynne Robinson's writing, I couldn't help but separate myself from the premise of the book itself.

Also, there were no chapter breaks. NOT A ONE.

THE VERDICT: 

Despite my own reservations, I can't help but feel that most people would appreciate Gilead. Particularly if you yourself have ever suffered from questions of spirituality, religion, or what it means to be religious, this is an incredibly intelligent book that highlights the doubts that come with all aspects and levels of faith. That said, if you, like me, settled a long time ago on the idea that religion itself is a farce adopted by the masses, this book may unfortunately fly right over your head; may seem as relevant as the homeless man spouting conspiracy theories on the subway. Certainly there's an element of parenthood involved (something to which I can also claim no allegiance) but Gilead is more or less an exploration of what it means to love humans in the context of loving God. Hard as I tried, I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it.

THE FACTS: 
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TITLE: Gilead
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AUTHOR: Marilynne Robinson
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PAGES: 247 (in paperback)
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ALSO WROTE: Home and Housekeeping
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SORTA LIKE: Mere Christianity meets Jesus Land
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FIRST LINE: "I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."
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Son of a Preacher Man

So I kind of took a week off last week. I know! I know, it's bad. But you guys, there's just so. much. television. And work. And dinners to attend, bars to frequent, friends to visit. And iPhone Tetris. Oh sweet Lord, the iPhone Tetris. Truth be told, my 2011 hasn't gone well so far in terms of distractions from the printed word. On the upside, I haven't bought any books either (hey, every cloud has a silver lining).

But I'm determined to get back on the wagon after a series of defeats (though I maintain that Too Big To Fail was, well, too big). This week's read comes highly recommended from a friend/coworker, whose suggestions always stand out to me since she tolerates more or less nonstop book and TV chatter from my side of the cube farm. (Think about it--can you imagine sitting next to me all day?) Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is something of a reflection on life, written in the voice of an aging rural preacher who is hoping to bequeath his knowledge of this world and the next to his son before he dies (the father, not the son).

I have anticipatory angst over this book, since it won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 2005. Which is to say that if I don't like it, I'm probably an uncultured idiot (something I've refused to accept despite bountiful evidence). So, wish me luck--at the very least with avoiding the remote control this week.

Where Kurt Cobain Went After He Died

Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret is an odd duck.

I could debate whether the quirkiness of his stories is best attributed to a "lost in translation" type of effect, but even that kind of discrepancy wouldn't be enough to account for how unique they are, and how downright weird. In reading up on the author (thank you Wikipedia) I found that his stories are widely popular among Israeli youth, who see them as something of a reflection on their national ethos. What does this mean? While American 20-somethings are texting and playing video games, young adults in Israel are poignantly preoccupied with thoughts of life and death, heaven and hell, good and evil.

Indeed, many of the stories in The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God touch on some of those central themes: the meaning of life, what happens after we die, the fairness of God. Some reference Israeli youths' (mandatory) time in the military, while others touch on Holocaust Remembrance Day, for obvious reasons a rather heavy subject there. 

Yet despite its dark themes, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Bus Driver in particular, and Keret in general, is funny. Not laugh out loud funny, often not even chuckle to oneself funny, but humorous in a darker way, in a way that suggests lamenting the injustices of life is pointless, so laughing about them seems like a good second choice. 

Knowing When to Accept Defeat

Even the best of us (and yes, I'm obviously counting myself among the best) sometimes fail. As I have these past two weeks, during which I spent far more time watching movies—seriously Kira, The Princess and the Frog?—and eating potato chips than reading.

In fairness, I'm still halfway through Too Big To Fail and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (the third and thank Jesus last in the series), but since the entire goal of this project was to, you know, finish books, the fact that I've managed to toss back a few hundred random pages doesn't count. It just keeps me from feeling entirely brain dead.

So it's time to move on. I'm sure I'll eventually finish Too Big to Fail, hopefully in time for the next market crash, and I'll manage to work my way through the rest of Hornet's Nest. But I just need to accomplish something this week, other than dragging my vacation-loving self back to the office and away from the holiday leftovers (by which I mean food I allowed myself to buy while on vacation and continue to keep in the kitchen, where it beckons me with sugary/fatty goodness).

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known mostly for his short stories and graphic novels, who I discovered by chance a few years back. I read his 2006 book of short stories, The Nimrod Flipout, and remember finding it quirky, funny and entirely enjoyable. So this week I'm moving on, or I suppose back, to his 2004 collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God (& Other Stories). If for no other reason than the cover art.