“He must have chosen right for a change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.“He must have chosen right for a change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.”
You’ll notice the conspicuous “e” tucked in the middle of that proper noun. The quote above is not from Vollmann, but rather from the late pages of Pynchon’s VINELAND, published the same year as THE ICE-SHIRT. As I come close to finishing my reads and rereads of Pynchon’s entire corpus, I’ve come to realise that among his principal concerns across his entire body of work are the legacies of power and resistance to that power. To abstract that thought a little further, this opposition is the basis of metamorphosis and ontological instability. One of the most common expressions of this metamorphosis, is the complex history of settlement and resettlement across the American continent, how these sedimentary layers of colonisation and dispersal contribute to a changing landscape, and consequently how “the landscape around us is but a shadow of the landscape within us.” Positioning this as a guiding principle, I consider these two authors to be in constant conversation with one another. It'll come as no surprise that they're two of my all-time favourites. In Pynchon’s oeuvre, you’ll find the aforementioned metamorphosis expressed through his rendition of California. For Vollmann, you’ll find it in his BOOK OF NORTH AMERICAN LANDSCAPES, the first of which I’ve just completed.
Pynchon readers can expect his authorial voice to resemble something of a cultural historian (albeit, a hysterical one). In the case of Vollmann, “just as a ghost must hover and rush at the extremity of it’s fog-tether, unfree until the last bone, the last rotten rad of its life-shirt has decayed”, his intent is to depict a “Symbolic History”, blending myth, fabulism, reification, and fact. In the ICE-SHIRT, his readers find themselves in the (caveat: unstable) 10th Century, fixating their gaze upon the figures of Gudrid and Freydis, one of which may be an embellishment of the oral tradition. Through the lens of these two women and drawn from the primary texts of The Grænlendinga Saga and Flateyjarbók, Vollmann captures the immutable essence of a failed colonisation of the Americas by the Norse. You may notice the bulk of the text is focused on the oppressive people, to whom our source texts have devoted far more ink and vellum. While he commands the use of colonial language relevant to the project, Vollmann’s sympathies lie with the oppressed Indigenous or “Skraelings” as they were disparagingly called by the Norse. Pynchon-heads might prefer the term “preterite”. Regardless of denotation, it's a well-placed sympathy, given their success at resistance conquer (at least for a quiet 600-odd years…)
“Oh those mummy-husks glow warm, and bright for the naked, like the empty red sun-shell dispensing lurid light to the People in Wineland who denied their chilled future”
Well I suppose this demands something of a subjective response from me. Can I equivocate? Midway through the text, the narrator William the Blind asks “Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)”. To that, I defer my answer until I can look across the foggy gap with the entirety of his Seven Dreams behind me. But if THE ICE-SHIRT has shown me anything, it’s that I’m in for the long haul....more
Late into THE PASSENGER, there's an exchange that occurs between Billy Western - the self-consciously comedic name of the novel's main character - andLate into THE PASSENGER, there's an exchange that occurs between Billy Western - the self-consciously comedic name of the novel's main character - and a close friend of his. I'm paraphrasing here, but the sentiment expressed to Western by his companion reads something to the effect of, "suffering is a part of the human condition, but misery is a choice".
It wasn't until this point that McCarthy had won me over with his ruminative, self-flagellating retread of the post-war American West. I have very little patience for prolonged self-sympathy, so I was glad to see McCarthy flip the spotlight back on himself and remind me that he's more aware of who he's writing than I had given him credit for. Billy Western may be constructed from a haphazard assemblage of genre cliches, but the silhouette is positioned as a figure of warning, not of admiration. A late-act hook turn, or maybe I'm just incredibly thick and everyone picked up on the sentiment from the jump...
I'm nowhere near a McCarthy completist - just a "Greatest Hits" consumer - so I speak with no authority in saying THE PASSENGER reads like a Paris Review retrospective; a career-bookending round-up from an author who's patently aware of a nearby coil off which a shuffling is imminent. But instead of rehashing his life, his work, and the intermingling of those two things, this exegetical duology comes across as a diffusive thematic miasma; reflections on a half-century of writing under the nuclear halo of the twenty-first century.
Whether or not all the disparate preoccupations of grief, complicity, trauma, and longing all cohere together is somewhat irrelevant; this duo is amorphous by design. The era of his tightly rendered plots is behind him; these are clearly last thoughts expressed via a last gasp.
I remain unconvinced that STELLA MARIS couldn't have been interpolated into the bulk of THE PASSENGER but I won't begrudge this coda for its existence. If he hadn't included it, I would've cheerfully accused the author of fridging his female lead (a plot contrivance I have no excuses for).
So where does that leave me in response to this pairing as a whole? I might reach for a quote:
"The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation."
If McCarthy were still among us, I'd send him a tersely worded email that would never make it past his spam filter, which would read something to the effect up "Wake the hell up Cormac - the 'careening toward' is in the rearview mirror now."
Merged review:
Late into THE PASSENGER, there's an exchange that occurs between Billy Western - the self-consciously comedic name of the novel's main character - and a close friend of his. I'm paraphrasing here, but the sentiment expressed to Western by his companion reads something to the effect of, "suffering is a part of the human condition, but misery is a choice".
It wasn't until this point that McCarthy had won me over with his ruminative, self-flagellating retread of the post-war American West. I have very little patience for prolonged self-sympathy, so I was glad to see McCarthy flip the spotlight back on himself and remind me that he's more aware of who he's writing than I had given him credit for. Billy Western may be constructed from a haphazard assemblage of genre cliches, but the silhouette is positioned as a figure of warning, not of admiration. A late-act hook turn, or maybe I'm just incredibly thick and everyone picked up on the sentiment from the jump...
I'm nowhere near a McCarthy completist - just a "Greatest Hits" consumer - so I speak with no authority in saying THE PASSENGER reads like a Paris Review retrospective; a career-bookending round-up from an author who's patently aware of a nearby coil off which a shuffling is imminent. But instead of rehashing his life, his work, and the intermingling of those two things, this exegetical duology comes across as a diffusive thematic miasma; reflections on a half-century of writing under the nuclear halo of the twenty-first century.
Whether or not all the disparate preoccupations of grief, complicity, trauma, and longing all cohere together is somewhat irrelevant; this duo is amorphous by design. The era of his tightly rendered plots is behind him; these are clearly last thoughts expressed via a last gasp.
I remain unconvinced that STELLA MARIS couldn't have been interpolated into the bulk of THE PASSENGER but I won't begrudge this coda for its existence. If he hadn't included it, I would've cheerfully accused the author of fridging his female lead (a plot contrivance I have no excuses for).
So where does that leave me in response to this pairing as a whole? I might reach for a quote:
"The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation."
If McCarthy were still among us, I'd send him a tersely worded email that would never make it past his spam filter, which would read something to the effect up "Wake the hell up Cormac - the 'careening toward' is in the rearview mirror now."
Merged review:
Late into THE PASSENGER, there's an exchange that occurs between Billy Western - the self-consciously comedic name of the novel's main character - and a close friend of his. I'm paraphrasing here, but the sentiment expressed to Western by his companion reads something to the effect of, "suffering is a part of the human condition, but misery is a choice".
It wasn't until this point that McCarthy had won me over with his ruminative, self-flagellating retread of the post-war American West. I have very little patience for prolonged self-sympathy, so I was glad to see McCarthy flip the spotlight back on himself and remind me that he's more aware of who he's writing than I had given him credit for. Billy Western may be constructed from a haphazard assemblage of genre cliches, but the silhouette is positioned as a figure of warning, not of admiration. A late-act hook turn, or maybe I'm just incredibly thick and everyone picked up on the sentiment from the jump...
I'm nowhere near a McCarthy completist - just a "Greatest Hits" consumer - so I speak with no authority in saying THE PASSENGER reads like a Paris Review retrospective; a career-bookending round-up from an author who's patently aware of a nearby coil off which a shuffling is imminent. But instead of rehashing his life, his work, and the intermingling of those two things, this exegetical duology comes across as a diffusive thematic miasma; reflections on a half-century of writing under the nuclear halo of the twenty-first century.
Whether or not all the disparate preoccupations of grief, complicity, trauma, and longing all cohere together is somewhat irrelevant; this duo is amorphous by design. The era of his tightly rendered plots is behind him; these are clearly last thoughts expressed via a last gasp.
I remain unconvinced that STELLA MARIS couldn't have been interpolated into the bulk of THE PASSENGER but I won't begrudge this coda for its existence. If he hadn't included it, I would've cheerfully accused the author of fridging his female lead (a plot contrivance I have no excuses for).
So where does that leave me in response to this pairing as a whole? I might reach for a quote:
"The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation."
If McCarthy were still among us, I'd send him a tersely worded email that would never make it past his spam filter, which would read something to the effect up "Wake the hell up Cormac - the 'careening toward' is in the rearview mirror now."...more
Despite THE ANNUAL BANQUET [...] firing on seemingly all cylinders of my personal taste - irreverent historiography, cerebral perversions, disdain forDespite THE ANNUAL BANQUET [...] firing on seemingly all cylinders of my personal taste - irreverent historiography, cerebral perversions, disdain for realist conventions - it still managed to leave me a little cold.
Maybe my expectations were mismanaged by the expansive perfection of TELL THEM OF BATTLES [...]. Or maybe it was Énard's decision to position the hilariously insufferable David Mazon as his protagonist, only to abandon him for nearly 80% of the book. JUST when I was starting to love the guy, and the pitch-perfect satire of academic self-importance he represents. Mathias! You did me dirty! Though it'd be unfair to leave the necessity of this construction unacknowleged; I get why he did it, but that doesn't stop me from being irked that he did.
What I CAN appreciate from Énard's latest fictive exercise, is the use of Mazon as an exploratory conduit into the author's own disregard for his country of origin. His narrator's self-involvement blinds him to the extraordinary bachannalian carnival that he's playing house in. Mazon's concern begins and ends with cultural tourism dressed up as academic expediency. I suspect many scholars play similar mind games with themselves to justify a lurid anthropological gaze. It's telling that THIS is the way that Énard chooses to engage with his personal provenance directly for the first time.
Hmmm, I suppose that when taking into account Énard's Orientalist preoccupations, perhaps THE ANNUAL BANQUET [...] isn't quite the black sheep in his catalogue after all. Maybe it's just the same thematic thread being tugged back into the direction Western Europe. All things come full circle sooner or later, don't they....more
"That's Polis for you - an island of life's hostages."
A madcap, down-and-out picaresque who those who know (and appreciate) what an absolute dogfight "That's Polis for you - an island of life's hostages."
A madcap, down-and-out picaresque who those who know (and appreciate) what an absolute dogfight it is trying to anchor their life to something stable in the Year of our Lord 2023 (well, 2024 at the time I write this). Johnson explodes the capacities of ordinary experience into something extraordinary, much in the same way one of my favorite contemporaries Adam Levin does. I would expect those who find themselves at home in the latter's hospitable novels would feel welcomed in Johnson's careening, hyperbolic metropolis. This is an odyssey for those who don't want to go on one, and a wildly impressive debut.
"It's no use trying to burn this place down [...] We would just build another."...more