This was the “follow up” to With the Old Breed, which is the greatest first-person account of war I’m aware of. It was written by the same guy, Eugene Sledge. Unfortunately, it turns out that 100 pages of musings about sitting around in China after the war isn’t quite as gripping as actual war narrative.

This is going to be a short post.

• They should have taken the last 20 pages of China Marine, when Sledge actually gets to go home, and put it at the end of With the Old Breed.
• And then the rest of it they could have posted on his website or whatever.

The last 20 pages or so were very cool and brought satisfying closure to the overall story that began with With the Old Breed. Just that the China that filled the first 80 pages was pretty bland. A lot of discussion of how it was annoying to still be in some amount of danger even though the war was over as well as talking about food and walking around Beijing.

Endut.

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1. For a book with a theme I identify with (i.e., people being born into lives not of their choosing and then having to deal with it), it seems like I should have liked it a lot better.
2. The main character sucked. I mean, as a person. He made frequent bad decisions against advice he should have listened to, thus leading to detrimental situations for everyone around him — and was shameless (and condescending) in doing so.
3. Which is problematic, because he was, as a result, very unsympathetic and the sparse setting and infrequent event doesn’t give you a lot else to care about.
4. Everyone who comes to know him ends up worse off as a result. I’m not sure what the message there is. People who fight their fates really mess stuff up for everyone else?
5. So many monologues.
6. While it was probably very clever the first time someone submitted a punctuation-free manuscript, McCarthy’s insistence on doing so in everything he writes is just self-indulgent and makes the book harder to read (and is probably just a cynical branding function).
7. It’s also hard to read paragraph after paragraph of dialogue in Spanish. I’m not sure how that was a good idea.
8. The getaway/chase scene at the end was utterly unintelligible and did not seem predicated on any gun found on the mantelpiece in the first chapter.

McCarthy obviously likes main characters who, over the course of a novel, stubbornly insist on not learning anything. At least in No Country the sheriff seemed to undergo some sort of transformation even if the cowboy dude didn’t. In The Road, the father was clearly detrimentally self-focused, but that sure never changed even though there were plenty of opportunities for him to recognize his errors. From a perception of reality standpoint, I think McCarthy has a good point about an individual’s inability to adapt. From an enjoyment of reading standpoint: guh.

I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten 80-percent through with a book and then just not cared about the last 20%. I’m starting to wonder if McCarthy is overrated.

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1. Writing the last great World War 2 novel.
2. Writing the first great asteroid mining novel.

I needed some vernacular to move ahead with #2, and I found this book (The Making of a Hardrock Miner by Stephen Voynick) on Amazon. It’s very good. It’s a first-person account of a guy who started working in western US mines in order to fund his living the life of a seasonally-employed other-seasonally man of leisure. It’s a very outsiderish perspective on mining. The guy works short stints at mines in Colorado, Arizona, and Wyoming. The outsiderness affords him insights that probably wouldn’t have been clear to someone on the inside; it also makes it easier for someone with no clue about mining to relate to the narrative.

I think there are two different kinds of first-person non-fiction accounts:

1. Those written for money.
2. Those written to expose truth.

I think an easy contrast between the two in World War II terms is anything by Robert Leckey was the first and Eugene Sledge’s book was the second. Most are probably the first kind. This book’s the second.

If you’re reading something written for money, it should make you skeptical of the content. The goal is to make money. People like excitement and controversy. People buy what they like. Ergo, books written for money are going to be more exciting and controversial than the actual experiences and events they describe. The Voynick book includes event. It’s unadorned and lays stuff out there for the reader to romanticize it, learn from it, or whatever.

Its central theme is also similar to one of the themes from my would-be mining novel: that certain people need risk and transience in their lives and, without it, feel insecure and ungrounded. Maybe I also identify with that sentiment. I’m probably never going to be a hardrock miner though.

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It also struck me as probably a really bad way to begin the NYC adventure — by longing for the wild, open spaces of the west.

There’s a lot that’s different this time around, though, in particular:

1. Pittsburgh is not New York City. You can drive in Pittsburgh. There are grocery stores with parking lots. Stuff is CHEAP. I’m going to be living in a house with a yard and a garage. I’ll be working with a group of people and I’ve already met some that are cool while at the same time not manic-depressive.
2. Pittsburgh is sort-of the West. Definitely through the Angle of Repose lens Pittsburgh would have been considered more like the wilderness that it would have been like the civilization of New York. And it’s sort of a frontier town anyway. Once you get out of downtown and Oakland, Pittsburgh starts looking and feeling like the capital of Appalachia, more like a part of West Virginia than part of the same state that includes Philadelphia.
3. The west isn’t The West. Maybe there are parts of Montana and Nevada that shouldn’t be painted with this gloss, but the modern-day west has nothing to do with the frontiers and taming-the-wilderness values and lifestyle of Angle of Repose. That’s one of the things the road trip taught me — the romantic West is pretty dead. In fact, it seemed more controlled and less “rugged individualist” than a lot of other parts of the country. Wyoming had the most offensive, threatening road signs in the country (e.g., “if you don’t wear your seatbelt, we’ll find you and it will cost you”-type messages) and most of the west was similar. Granted, I tend to perceive the world almost exclusively through a windshield, which might not always be an accurate reflection of reality, but still — driving in Michigan, for example, felt considerably more free. And after you’ve been on the trail to Half Dome for an hour and a half, you realize that the freedom and solitude and therefore to a large extent the bigness of the western wilderness is likewise little more than a matter of legend.

So basically, I think Pittsburgh will be much better than New York. And I don’t think it fits my ideal place to live, but after that road trip, I don’t know that a close approximation of my ideal exists anyway. Oh well.

And I still think that the book ends too quickly and/or that the author should have spent a little more time on the framing story to better justify its existence. And it’s still one of my top five books of all time.

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(A photo to keep the front page concept from breaking:

)

Good:

• Steinbeck writes very cleanly.
• Probably a useful depiction of a slice of life during the Great Depression (although… well, see below).
• Makes me glad I wasn’t a destitute farmer in (fictionalized) California during the 30s.

Bad:

• I swear there were blocking problems everywhere in this book. Was never sure who was in the scene or where in the scene they were — and this often mattered.
• Probably about twice as long as it should have been.
• It lacks event — essentially, this is a 400-page vignette. Very little in the way of plot or tension.
• There are certainly character arcs (Ma has the strongest, Casy obviously, Tom sure, Al sort of, Pa sort of, John should have but didn’t), but they’re just arcs. There are no epiphanies. Ma probably transcended herself, but she wasn’t the focus of the novel for the most part. No one else seemed inclined toward overcoming anything. And Ma’s development felt pretty arbitrary.
• While it might be a useful depiction of real life during the Depression, Steinbeck hammers his themes home with such ferocity that I’m inclined to worry that what was depicted may have been skewed to fit his needs.
• Man, but the PoV wandered. Wonder if that woman who taught that extension class at UCI knows about this…
• The interstitial chapters, the ones that talked in generalities but then didn’t, felt cloying, like they were trying too hard to be something.
• The climax was teased hard and obviously from Page One on, but no part of it started resolving until 80% of the way through. And then it was very, very sudden.

Meh. I liked Of Mice and Men a lot better. For one thing, it was the right length.

Disappointed,

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Hadn’t seen the movie version of Deliverance before reading the book, so didn’t know to expect things like “squeal like a pig” (it’s been a few months, but I don’t think that’s quite in the book like that — I mean, the scene happens, just that it’s not quite as iconic as it is in the movie). And I liked the way the book conveyed the characters better than the movie version, with the main character learning to take up the cause of his buddy and grab “real life” by the horns. Kind of a Bildungsroman for a middle-aged man learning to be alive. Also was enamored of the way the book dissipated rather than resolving. Made it feel less contrived and, I think, the openness and ambiguity at the end shined an interesting light on the book’s theme.

On the Road, though, is just so self-satisfied. I’m guessing the whole beat thing is by its nature self-satisfied. And the character of Dean Moriarty is so dull to me, yet the book requires the reader to idolize him. Didn’t work. He’s too cool to be believable and I guess I was brought up to dislike self-important jackasses. Blame my parents, I guess.

I think I also liked Deliverance better from the standpoint that it’s about having experiences for the sake of personal growth. I don’t think the beat generation was really into actual personal growth — I think that’s more about clapping with one hand. Yeah, well, I don’t care for Buddhism much either.

Iconoclastically,

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I also appreciated Game Dame‘s validation for not having to finish reading books that one does not like. I’m not sure she meant to imply thereby that it’s also okay to claim to have read a book that you only read, say, 100 pages of, but I’m taking that next step. Wikipedia mentions some worthy concerns and useful details about the list (it was compiled in 1998, Darkness at Noon shouldn’t qualify, it doesn’t include anything written after 1983, etc.).

1. ULYSSES by James Joyce – Never read it, but read #3 and drew (I’m assuming) accurate conclusions to the effect that James Joyce is the ultimate combination of Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome and Reading This Was Torture So It Must Be Art Syndrome.
2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald – Deathly slow and dull. Which, I imagine, is what F. Scott was going for. OTOH, to be called The Great American Novel — I dunno, I suppose our country *is* deathly slow and dull. Hopefully Obama will fix that.
3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce – Described above at #1. Unbearable, self-absorbed writing that shouldn’t be forced on anyone.
4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov – Never read.
5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley -I *liked* it. I think it’s a joke that it’s considered the fifth greatest novel in the English language. But, yeah, *liked* it.
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner – Never read. What I’ve read of Faulkner I’ve despised, but OTOH, I’m not sure that isn’t just because I didn’t like my Faulkner-phile AP English teacher. In retrospect, I’m *glad* I pissed her off by doing my Chemistry (Physics?) homework in her class every day.
7. CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller – Oddly, the Modern Library website left the author out of their list. Are they insinuating something? The novel is *so* one-note it’s unbearable. I may use that word again in this list. The characters don’t matter, the destination is vague, very little happens, and while I can appreciate snarkiness better than most, like violence, snarkiness without substance is doofishness.
8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler – An odd inclusion in that this book was translated from German. Oh. Well. It was okay. Interesting information and insight into post-revolution Gulaghood. But the writing was far from brilliant (although that may have been an issue with the translation).
9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence – I think I was supposed to read this for a college class that I ended up dropping once I took a look at the middle four pages of this book. Never read. Aside from those four pages.
10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck – Never read, but I sort of like Steinbeck, so I probably should.
11. UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry – Never read.
12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler – Never read.
13. 1984 by George Orwell – Greatest novel in the history of mankind. Too bad no one but me learned anything from it. I should probably read it again — it’s been a couple years.
14. I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves – Never read, but it *is* in my guest bathroom in case the stars ever align correctly.
15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf – Never read.
16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser – Never read.
17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers – Never read.
18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut – In my personal Top 5. The one novel Vonnegut ever needed to write. Sharp, funny, fast-moving, relatable.
19. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison – The opposite of Slaughterhouse-Five. Although I’m not sure it’s fair to claim books that I read in, yes, AP English. In 1989.
20. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright – Never read.
21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow – Never read, but it’s in my Amazon account as being “saved for later” and has been there since October 2, 2005.
22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara – Never read.
23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos – Never read.
24. WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson – Another AP English novel and one that I remember somewhat pleasantly. Slow but occasionally-enough engaging, IIRC.
25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster – Never read. Saw the movie, which I know doesn’t count, but didn’t portend to a book I’d enjoy reading in any way whatsoever.
26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James – Never read.
27. THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James – Never read.
28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald – Never read, but the Fitzgerald-James love bender that the Modern Library’s editorial board was on that day in 1998 seems noteworthy.
29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell – Never read.
30. THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford – Never read.
31. ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell – It is amazing how applicable this novel is to Every Single Organization on Earth. If I could have two Orwell books in my personal Top 5, this would be there.
32. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James – Never read. And, oddly enough, I usually confuse Fitzgerald for Henry James (and vice versa). Or at least, the two names occupy the same compartment in my brain. The compartment of “highly respected” American writers I’ve managed, probably thankfully, to avoid reading my entire life.
33. SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser – Never read.
34. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh – Never read.
35. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner – Never read. But hey, I was pretty solid back when we were doing the Top 20, right?
36. ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren – Never read.
37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder – Never read.
38. HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster – Never read.
39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin – Never read.
40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene – Never read.
41. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding – Really liked it when I read it in 9th Grade Honors English. Re-read it a few years ago and, well, it was still *good*, but it didn’t seem all that brilliant. Just seemed like mass market-quality writing with an interesting, iconic story.
42. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey – Never read *or* seen the movie.
43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell – Never read.
44. POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley – Never read.
45. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway – Never read.
46. THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad – Never read.
47. NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad – Never read. I *did* read Heart of Darkness though. Liked Apocolypse Now better.
48. THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence – Never read.
49. WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence – Never read.
50. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller – Never read.
51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer – Sucked. Tragically. I kept thinking there was something to this book, but it didn’t ever want to pay off. Or stick with the useful characters. Or end 500 pages sooner than it did.
52. PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth – Never read.
53. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov – Never read.
54. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner – Never read.
55. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac – Never read, but I’ve always meant to.
56. THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett – Horrifyingly unbearable. To me. Only to me. I realize the style wasn’t cliche when it was written, but it sure is now.
57. PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford – Never read.
58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton – Never read.
59. ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm – Never read. And I thought Ian made up the name Zuleika for his underwater arcology story. Huh. Notion shattered!
60. THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy – Never read.
61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather – Honestly can’t remember if I read this or not. If I did, it was in an American Literature class at BYU. We read *something* from Willa Cather for that class. Maybe this was it. I’m gonna say yes and that it was okay.
62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones – Haven’t read. Didn’t really dig Thin Red Line, but thought FHtE was a pretty good movie, so: maybe.
63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever – Never read.
64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger – I love Salinger’s writing quality, but hate his characters. Especially the ones in this book. I don’t get a lot out of understanding the inner-workings of the self-obsessed. Or maybe I do, just that I don’t need more than, say, five pages of it before it seems redundant.
65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess – Liked it, but thought the movie was way better. [spoiler]I think the original US editor of the book made the absolutely correct call to remove the ridiculous deus ex machina ending of it. That ending was in no way deserved or established by anything that had gone on before it. Ridiculous, IMHO.[/spoiler] But the made-up language especially was brilliant. I hate it when people tag stuff as being spoiler material.
66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham – Never read.
67. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad – Right, read it. Seemed slow. Was a long time ago.
68. MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis – Never read.
69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton – Never read.
70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell – Never read.
71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes – Never read.
72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul – Never read.
73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West – Never read.
74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway – Read. I’m not a Hemingway fan. It seems like his real life was way more interesting than his writing.
75. SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh – Never read.
76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark – Never read.
77. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce – Never read. Maybe Joyce is more enjoyable when you’re drunk. Probably puts you in the right frame of mind.
78. KIM by Rudyard Kipling – Never read.
79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster – Never read.
80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh – Never read, but why are so many of these books the subject matter for BBC-made movies and mini-series? Crazy. I don’t like BBC-made movies or mini-series I don’t think.
81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow – Never read.
82. ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner – Personal Top Five and a little surprising to me that any sort of editorial board manned up enough to include this book. This is, IMHO, without a doubt, IMHO, arguably, IMHO The Great Novel of the American West. No one else ever needs to write another one.
83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul – Never read.
84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen – Never read.
85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad – Never read, but man, what’s with the Joseph Conrad love?
86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow – Never read.
87. THE OLD WIVES’ TALE by Arnold Bennett – Never read.
88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London – I *think* I’ve read it. I like everything I’ve read by Jack London. I *know* I read White Fang. I *am* going to write a novel set in the asteroid belt that basically borrows the plot from Call.
89. LOVING by Henry Green – Never read.
90. MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie – Never read, but his name always reminds me of the fatwa that went out against him and the corresponding Dennis Miller SNL Weekly News in which was stated that his last name means “man who is in a rush to die“. I don’t remember it because it was funny, I just remember it.
91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell – Never read.
92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy – Never read.
93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles – Never read.
94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys – Never read.
95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch – Never read.
96. SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron – Never read.
97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles – Never read.
98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain – Never read.
99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy – Never read.
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington – Never read.

In terms of heinous omissions, the only two that come readily to mind would be Bukowski’s Post Office and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I might also argue for Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.

I’ve only read 20 of the above, but that still seems like a lot. Meh. You?

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Pros:

• Really long. Makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something. Sure, it’s a pyrrhic victory, but still: a victory!
• Nice binding.
• There were two characters I vaguely liked, Hearn and Red. Didn’t like anything that happened to them or that they did, of course, but — you know.
• You can skip pages without missing much.
• Some of the modernish flashback sections were nice. Others weren’t.

Cons:

• 700 freakin’ pages. Trimming the count by 400-500 might have imbued it with some, I dunno, necessity let’s say.
• No plot. None. Some occasional feints, but those were quickly disregarded. A few were left hanging (how poignant!).
• Character soup. There were several characters who could have exchanged names halfway through without my noticing.
• The collection of characters was not believable. Every single one of them was an asocial near-moron with a ridiculous array of issues. None of them were capable of making a friend, for instance. And, sure, there are people like that in the world. I’m guessing somewhere on the order of 1-2% of the US population could be described that way. If there’s a statistician out there, maybe you could calculate the likelihood of 12 members of a platoon all being plucked by random out of that 1-2%. Or, heck, *I* can do it: .02 ^ 12 = 4.1 * 10^-21 = not very likely.
• And if you create a book with such an unlikelihood, then the book better the heck be *about* that unlikelihood.
• I’m not sure the book was about anything, actually. It seemed hell-bent on proving that random things happen to random people in war. Huh: that’s a stunner.
• When anything can happen, nothing matters.
• The odds of getting 12 guys in a platoon *that* sex-obsessed are probably better than the calculation above — but still doesn’t seem very likely. They were *very* sex-obsessed.
• Mailer shows very little capacity for language (for the most part). His constant use of the most worthless of worthless adverbs (“he stared dully”, “Ridges smiled vaguely”, etc. and repeat for 700 pages).
• The book fits way to neatly within the sad, “we gotta feel sorry for the troops” political bent of the US left.  It just doesn’t mesh with what I’ve read about front-line fighting from a number of different sources (none of which could easily be construed as pro-war). The events in this novel were atypical, but presented as if they were typical.
•  Meh.

Dully,

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(And the binding was actually pretty average — I was just trying to be nice.)

Closed shop on my spec-fic literary magazine dream. Officially. It’s probably been dead since last summer — at least, in my heart. I feel bad for holding onto some stories over that time. It’s probably not the biggest crime ever committed by an editor, but maybe it is. Ultimately, though:

• It wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped.
• The reading market really isn’t demanding that another web-zine exist.
• In fact, we had far more submitters than readers. Far. More.
• I couldn’t get anything written while working on TR.
• After the second issue, I started to doubt that running the mag would expedite my ascent to King of the World.
• My slush readers were fantastic (many sincere thanks).

And hopefully someone knocks off my layout approach. I really think that’s the way to go for online literary journals: make it look more like print. Print looks that way because it’s easier to read serifed fonts, loosened leading, ten-ish words per line, and indented paragraphs over the long-haul, not just because it’s a different medium. IMHO. Always IMHO.

Bleib schoen gesund.

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• How did the planet get like this? How long have they been walking? How old is the boy? How old is the man? Where are they exactly? Why is it always cold? How did they survive whatever happened? What are the bloodcults? (*They* sound interesting — you should write your story about them instead!) Who are these roving gangs? We need more back-story, otherwise this is way too confusing. You should try using more exposition if you don’t want to confuse people. No editor would ever buy a novel that confuses people like this one does.
• Sometimes you wrote paragraphs about stuff that didn’t seem relevant to what was going on — you should get rid of those or else explain what they mean.
• Once in a while you wrote some long run-on sentences that were really distracting. You should try breaking them up into smaller sentences.
• I don’t even know the characters’ names!
• Or what they look like!
• I don’t like stories where the action all happens in dialog.
• Your writing requires a lot of trust from the reader. You need to give stronger indications early on that let me know I can trust you.
• The lack of punctuation and irregular capitalization was totally gimmicky. You should just use normal punctuation.
• There wasn’t enough of a setting here. I never felt like I could see what was going on.
• This world feels trite. I feel like I’ve read this before — a bunch of times.
• The pace was too slow — you should pick it up by adding event.
• My main concern was a lack of forward movement in the story. It was like it was a series of loosely connected vignettes.
• I stopped at the part where you implied that the dog was killed because people shouldn’t mistreat animals. (I was okay with the cannibalism, just not when they killed the dog.)
• Sometimes the dialog was confusing. If you added dialog tags, I’d know who was speaking; you should do that.
• Some of the dialog was repetitive! I got really tired of having the kid say “okay”. You should change it up a little. Kids have bigger vocabularies than that!
• I got tired of reading about those two characters. You need more characters to keep it interesting.
• I’m not sure this is realistic enough. If the guy is sick or injured or starving, I don’t think he could possibly do all the things he did. You should do more research.
• There are a lot of convenient plot points in the story, like every time they really need something, they *just happen* to find it. They need to earn everything.
• This story is too cold and bleak and there’s not enough reason to hope. I don’t like that.
• The POV shift was thoroughly annoying.
• The tension in the story was great, but when they finally reached their objective, I wasn’t sure what was still on the table — only that there were still 50 or 60 pages left. I need something that gives me a stronger indication of what I’m still reading for and what the characters are trying to achieve; the ultimate aim that’s achieved seems oddly missing throughout most of the book. (<– This would’ve been my comment.)

I love the fact that this book exists, got published, got reviewed glowingly, and got read widely. Gives me hope for the future. A little bit.

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Slaughterhouse Five is one of my five favorite books ever. I keep trying to find something else from Vonnegut that exudes the same energy and necessity of that book. Cat’s Cradle didn’t do it for me. At the end of the day, the novel felt naked and didactic, like an excuse to meander around a world-view. It felt self-indulgent to me.

There are a few areas in which a novel can excel in order to spark interest: plot, character, setting, and language/style. The Greatest Novel of All Time probably excels at all of those — but I don’t think that novel’s been written yet. If a writer can nail two or three, it’s probably worth reading. Heck, if you completely kill on one of those four, the novel will probably do well for most readers. For me, Cat’s Cradle doesn’t excel at any of the above.

The plot is thin — and given that it’s intended as comedy, that’s to be expected. Still, there’s no point at which the main character faces a Problem, battles with Complications, and then either succeeds or fails. Instead, the book’s tension is based on withholding a mystery from the reader — what’s the deal with the ice and why does the author keep hinting at how important it is? It’s not a very gripping source of tension and, from the standpoint of plot alone, there’s no reason not to turn to the last ten pages of the book and see how it turns out. I don’t feel like I would’ve missed out on key plot points by doing so.

Characters in this novel are thin and two-dimensional (if that). Again, this is meant to be a comedy, or a parable maybe, so stock characters may be called for. But by not having any actual depth or texture in the characters, character does not provide a reason to care about the novel. The characters come off as so subservient to the Message and are so devoid of reality, that their idiosyncrasies feel arbitrary and manipulative rather than interesting.

I’m guessing Cat’s Cradle defenders would argue this point with me, but I found that the novel’s setting was practically non-existent. At least, I didn’t come away from the book feeling like I Was There. The eventual San Lorenzo is sparsely described and, as with the characters, seems entirely subservient to the Message. I don’t feel like I get the sense of another actual place — it felt like it was all happening on a sound stage. To a certain extent, the same could probably be said for Slaughterhouse Five — except that with Slaughterhouse Five, well, first off there was, in fact, more attention to setting details, but also SH5 builds a landscape out of the minds of its author and protagonist. In Cat’s Cradle, we get so little from the narrator in terms of his way of thinking, this doesn’t happen. Maybe it should have.

Finally the writing and style of the novel — well, it’s the trademark Kurt Vonnegut style, except that he did it better elsewhere. There are no coy self-references like occurred in SH5, no cunning self-deprecation, no fierceness of joy in the absurdity of language and the novel format. It’s just sort of jaunty and tossed-off. Reminded me of something I heard regarding Wes Anderson’s recent movies: merely whimsical, not actually funny. Having read SH5 previously, the writing in Cat’s Cradle felt like an unremarkable shadow of what Vonnegut eventually accomplished.

As a result, I come away from Cat’s Cradle feeling like I’d just read a thinly masked agenda story. And unless you already cling *religiously* (heh) to its message, there’s not much fun to be had. Sort of like a Michael Moore movie. In terms of communicative efficiency, it would’ve been more profound for Vonnegut to have simply written the sentence “People believe in and do stupid things, which is especially problematic when they have access to nuclear arsenals.” I didn’t find anything in the novel that conveyed any other idea of any significance. And frankly, that message itself seems pretty dull in the modern world, especially without a fresher and less foregone lens through which to view and appraise it.

I dunno. Maybe cynicism for its own sake was new and exciting back in 1963.

All that said, while I didn’t enjoy the book overall, I appreciated its brevity (that’s not meant entirely back-handedly — short novels rarely overstay their welcomes). Also, it’s a very easy read, and there’s a lot to be said for a writing style that allows for that. Unfortunately, I didn’t find enough else in this one to make me care.

If I missed something in this book, let me know what it was.

bkd

And I think the fascinating thing about war is sitting there safe in your bedroom wondering how you yourself would handle the sorts of hell that only war can present. I think boot camp would’ve set me up to be all right, but I probably would’ve gotten cocky and shot after a couple weeks on the line.

I’m about 2,000 words into my Guadalcanal novel now. I realize how trite it is to write a Guadalcanal novel, but some of my best (IMHbcO, o’ course) work happens when I go after trite subject matters. Mal sehen how long that streak lasts. So far I’m holding steady with the PoV char’s squad leader being an ex-Amish guy who’s trying all-too-hard to not be Amish any more. In another month or two I’ll be able to go back and read it and see if it comes off as humor or just another failed attempt at putting the f-word in a story.

Then I went onto Amazon tonight and bought $125 in additional Guadalcanal-related books. I need to figure out where I can get my hands on a Springfield 03A3. Not sporterized. And hopefully under $1K. Amazon doesn’t sell 03′s. Haven’t found my KA-BAR yet either. Man I suck.

L8,

bkd