A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Miller

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Donald Miller

USA

2009

“…we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage.”

            The theme this month in my reading life seems to be one of optimism. I suppose that bodes well for a start to the new year, and it is certainly a welcome change from my MA subjects of study (Modernism and African American Lit are two of the things I love most in this world, but I wouldn’t say reading either is a particularly joyful experience). I don’t want to think of myself as inherently pessimistic, but sometimes my mind attacks me and tells me all kinds of terrible things,  like life is meaningless and we all die alone – especially you will die alone, Emily, and not, unfortunately, for a very, very long time. I recently assigned my students to read David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech to Kenyon University. In it he says that he understands why people who shoot themselves usually do it in the head; that’s the part that’s plaguing them – the “evil master,” he calls it. (I did not mention to the students that DFW committed suicide himself, later, but one of the more dedicated ones came up after class and expressed her surprise at having found that out. Does that make what he says about controlling your thinking any less valid? I don’t think so. It seems like just more evidence for his claim.) Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I understand Foster Wallace’s point, which is why I’ve become a Buddhist – so that I can learn to control my thinking and not be such a slave to my mental demons. It is also why it is something of a relief to read authors like Glass and Miller who believe that at the bottom of everything there is a fundamental connection between people, that the essence of the world is good not just in some mystical, veiled sense, but right here, now.

            Miller’s book is about what he learned while working with a couple of filmmakers to make a movie out of his memoir. If that makes you think this book is about the craft of writing, you are right. But what’s cool and unique about it is that Miller takes the lessons he learns about how to craft a good story – a good story has “a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it,” “good stories have good scenes” – and applies them to his life, so that the book is interesting not only for writers and artists, but for anyone who wants, as Miller thought-provokingly terms it, to “live a good story.” I do, I do! The only problem, for me, is that I want to write them, too.  

It’s fine to read Miller’s book as a regular person. It’s good to think about how to create more risk and meaning in our lives. But it’s harder to read it as a writer, and think about combining that role with being a person. The lessons Miller learns make me feel anxious and guilty, as well as inspired, because when I read them I find it difficult to control my mind, which is constantly telling me that I’m not doing enough. Not only am I not living a good story, but I’m not writing them, either. I understand that I have done some pretty awesome things, and I have even written a few things that I feel really proud of, but the fact remains that it is never not true that I could be doing more. I could get up earlier. I could stay up later. I could forgo the hangouts or the elaborate lesson plans. I could dedicate myself to my art. Whatever I do is never good enough for me. Is this my story? Miller says you can change your story, choose-you-own-adventure, so to speak. It’s all up to me.

Maybe there is some direction for me in the ending to the book, in the part where he gets to the hope that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Writing about a bike ride he took across the country, Miller says, “If a story sets our moral compass, my compass had changed from cynicism to hope. I didn’t believe the television pundits anymore. I didn’t believe people were by nature bad or my neighbor was my enemy. The America we see on television and read about in the newspapers isn’t the America we found as we pedaled across the country at fifteen miles per hour. We encountered no fear or tension. Instead, in small towns stitched together by back roads, we found kindness.” So maybe I need to concentrate, too, on turning my moral compass from cynicism to hope, and expect the reception of my private thoughts to be met with kindness and interest, rather than scorn and dismissal. My very smart fiancé always says that life gives you what you expect it to, and in fact I know someone who won the Powerball jackpot. He was already rich before that, and people kept asking him why he was even playing Powerball in the first place. You know what he said? He said that he kept playing because he thought he would win. Playing Powerball would be a lot easier than what I’m trying to do, but it probably wouldn’t make as good of a story.

           

           

The Whole World Over, Glass

The Whole World Over

Julia Glass

2006

USA

“The birds’ migration routes crisscrossed the map like a craze of telephone wires, swooping gracefully from one coast to another. The seemed almost to secure the world, all these well-traveled paths in the sky, the way ribbon or twine secures a precious gift.”

It’s fitting that I bought my copy of The Whole World Over on what amounted to a mini tour of the United States. My fiancé is in the process of interviewing for medical residency programs, and over the Christmas holiday I was lucky enough to be able to accompany him to some of them. On a lovely wander about Tucson, AZ, I picked up this novel, and it became my constant companion through flights to Madison, WI, New York City, and back home to Portland, OR. Even though, at over 500 pages, it’s by no means a short book, I was sad to see it, and my trip, come to an end.

            The novel starts out in the consciousness of baker, mother, and wife Greenie Duquette, who is in some sense the main but by no means the only character. Other chapters allow us into the psyches of Alan, Greenie’s husband, Walter, her friend, and Saga, a young woman with whom Alan builds an unlikely friendship. Amidst the many other appealing personalities populating the novel is the reticent but loveable Fenno McLeod from Glass’s equally excellent first novel, Three Junes. Greenie’s departure from New York City to New Mexico after taking a job as head cook in the governor’s mansion is the event that sets the book in motion, and while the differences between these two worlds are interesting in their own right, what’s really at stake here are the relationships between the characters and, in turn, their relationships with themselves.

            The ultimate pleasure of reading Glass’s novels lies in their richness of detail and the almost magical way she’s able to connect what seem like a million moving parts. The book Greenie reads to her son becomes the name of their dog, who Alan gets from Saga, who meets Walter at an important moment after becoming friends with Fenno… it sounds convoluted, but in Glass’s expert hands the interactions feel completely natural, an accurate depiction of the way things tie together in real life, the whole world over, as they do in the image of migratory bird routes on display in Fenno’s bookstore.

            In addition to exploring the haphazard but important ways we come to know each other, the novel is interested in how we come to know ourselves. Glass’s prose insists that this knowing cannot be separated from our knowledge of others, but the book also questions whether such influences can be detrimentally misleading or confusing. How can you know if what you feel is true? How can you know if you would be the same person you are now if you had not met the people you did? The answers to these questions have consequences, of course, not just for our own self-knowledge, but for how we’re able to maintain and benefit from our relationships with others. Love relationships (hetero and homosexual) are the primary focus here, but family bonds and varying degrees of friendship also get a good amount of stage time.

            The Whole World Over is staunchly realistic in the very best sense of the term: it emphasizes characterization and gives us a great deal of knowledge on both the internal and external forces motivating the characters’ thoughts and actions. The fact that Glass follows not just one, but four characters, adds greater depth to this effect. What’s particularly charming about the book is that though it portrays many unhappy scenarios, the overarching mood of is one of optimism and a belief that even though we are all coming and going, lost in our own internal hells of confusion and uncertainty, connection abounds. We are not alone and isolated at all, but attached to one another in ways we notice every day and in ways only a talented novelist can help us glimpse, and appreciate.

The Hunger Games, Collins

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins

2008

USA

            Over Christmas break, I read The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, because vacation means you are supposed to consume junk food, in this case in the form of a YA bestselling novel. I sought out this book for my vacation reading because I found the premise of it (which I learned of from friends and by seeing the preview for the upcoming film) intriguing: It’s some unspecified time in the future. The United States has endured a civil war and now the victors – The Capitol – lord it over the 12 surrounding Districts, hoarding food and goods for themselves and keeping the rest of the country in poverty to maintain the status quo. As a yearly reminder that rebellion against the Capitol doesn’t pay, two children between the ages of 12-18 are chosen from each district as "tributes," to compete in the Hunger Games, a fight to the death in which the last child alive “wins.” Of course, there are plenty of surprises to keep those pages turning. I couldn’t put it down and now, two days after finishing the book, all I can think about is buying the next one in the trilogy.

The best part, for me, was the richness and novelty of the descriptions both of the Districts and the Capitol. Anyone with a penchant for fantasy or science fiction knows what I’m talking about – the fancy machines that wash your hair for you, the plethora of food available at the push of the button, and outlandish costumes and fashion trends of the make-believe future and, in contrast, the brutal life in the poorest District, where hunting is illegal and workers must buy back the food and goods they produce at crippling prices. And then, of course, there’s the embedded social commentary.

I don’t know whether she intended it or not, but a lot of what goes on in the world of The Hunger Games might very well be taken as a critique of the issues facing our own society today. The Capitol taking wealth directly from the hands and mouths of the rest of the country seems strongly reminiscent of the claim that the 99% is being oppressed by the 1% in the U.S., which the recent “Occupy” movement has brought to our attention. And some of the discussions between Katniss and Rue, another Hunger Games tribute from a different district, call to mind Marx’s analysis of the worker who, because she lacks ownership or even the ability to purchase the goods and services she produces, becomes alienated from her work and her society. Here is a conversation between Katniss and Rue to explain what I mean: “‘I’d have thought, in District Eleven, you’d have a bit more to eat than us. You know, since you grow the food,’ I say. Rue’s eyes widen. ‘Oh, no, we’re not allowed to eat the crops.’ ‘They arrest you or something?’ I ask. ‘They whip you and make everyone else watch,’ says Rue. ‘The mayor’s very strict about it.’” Of course, we don’t whip people here for stealing or for entering the country illegally, but we do arrest and deport our own food workers on a daily basis, and you can’t tell me there isn’t an element of power and humiliation inherent in that punishment, too.

I could go on and on, making comparisons between the Capitol and the current United States. There’s plenty more to say about it. But in the interest of starting off 2012 with happy thoughts, I’ll end my analysis there.  The good news is that you don’t have to register any of this between the lines stuff to enjoy The Hunger Games. Regardless of your political ideology, you’re sure to feel both sympathy and admiration for Katniss Everdeen and many of her fellow tributes as they navigate the massive, manipulated, and deadly game they have no choice but to play.  

Tropic of Capricorn, Miller

Tropic of Capricorn

Henry Miller

USA

1938

“I will not do this. I will do some other thing! Very good. But can you do nothing at all? Can you stop thinking about doing anything? Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know?”

            This book is a strange combination of elements – stream-of-consciousness, dada, spiritual text, and coming-of-age tale. Like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man it tells an at least partially autobiographical tale of the artist from youth to young-adulthood for the purpose of figuring out how the artist became the way he is, and how he reached his particular understanding of his role. There’s also a similar lack of delineation between one section and the next (one wants paragraphs, chapters, section headings – and is continually denied such comforts). Unlike Portrait, however, Tropic zips between ages and stages, so that the reader has to pay close attention to where Henry is at every moment. No matter how much things change, however, the obsessions of the protagonist remain the same: sex, writing, suffering, and truth.

            It’s easy to get distracted by the portrayal of sex in this novel. It’s not surprising that the book was banned for “obscenity” in the States, and had to be published in France. The large middle section, the womb of the book, if you will, is consumed with images of Miller having sex with everyone from hookers to his wife. I was reminded of Norman Mailer’s alleged misogyny in An American Dream in these sections, and there is at least one episode where the author appears to describe raping a woman as a wonderful experience (for him). Still, I think that the sex is a distraction for us, almost like a trick – an arrow pointing in the wrong direction - though it may have been a path to renewal for the author. What is more interesting is the spiritual aspect of Miller’s ruminations.

            What the author is interested in here is figuring out what is essential and what is true – not merely what happened, or what we, in an everyday sort of way consider to be “true,” but so much more. He claims to want to get to the “thing in itself,” a la Kant. Not “how does one become successful?” but “What is worthwhile?” One thing he claims again and again to absolutely not be worthwhile is the backbone of America, and capitalist culture in general – i.e. “making a living.” Though he holds a few jobs throughout the course of the book, for him making money is worse than beside the point because it gets in the way of the real work of life.

This disconnect between working and actually living life is the central problem, a problem which is perhaps greater for the artist than for any other worker. Miller seems to oscillate between the belief that the artist is the only toiler with any hope of stepping outside the “automated process,” and the concern that even the artist is missing the point – that even expression gets in the way of the true goal, which is silent acceptance. Probably the best example this is Miller’s friend, Grover, who as a young adult suddenly becomes a born-again Christian and hence the most “alive” person Miller has ever met. The difference is not religion, but rather that “if once, like other people, [Grover] had thought it was necessary to get somewhere now he knew that somewhere was anywhere and therefore right here and so why move?” Why indeed? Perhaps we feel we have to because, as Miller seems to realize in Tropic of Capricorn, we are all caught in the wheel of suffering (samsara in Buddhism). In Tropic of Capricorn Miller seems to reach some profound realizations on his own path to enlightenment (/artisthood?). The beauty of the book is that, if one can get past the distraction of the “obscenity,” observing another’s journey can help others along the path, too.

You Don't Love This Man, DeWeese

You Don’t Love This Man

Dan DeWeese

2011

USA

“Among the million images of my daughter that had passed through my eyes, why were these the ones that lingered? Asleep during a toddler nap, aloft above the playground, laughing at the table: each was of Miranda alone, I noticed. Or alone, save for the presence of the mind recording the moments, of course. Save for me. “

Why do things happen the way they happen? Is life merely a series of meaningless coincidences? Do our actions or non-actions play any kind of role in the outcome? Do some people have control while others stand by, waiting and stewing? These are some of the questions raised by Dan DeWeese’s novel, You Don’t Love This Man. Another question might be who is “this man,” anyway? On the surface the title seems to refer to Grant, the protagonist’s one-time friend and future son-in-law, but it’s possible that it also refers to the main character himself. As a quiet, mild-mannered bank manager, Paul does not make a particularly exciting hero, after all. In fact the author himself refers to the character, in the afterward, as a “sidelined” person. It makes sense: Paul is in many ways only coincidentally and peripherally involved in the plot itself, but this book is not about the plot. It is about the mind at work observing the plot as it unfolds. These seemingly trivial, yet weighty, observations of the main character – a spider building a web outside his office window over the course of several days, the disappearance of his co-worker’s freckles when she wears makeup, and his recognition that he does not want them to disappear – were some of my favorite parts of the book.  

In my MA degree I studied “British Modernist” literature with particular care, and it seems to me that DeWeese’s novel has several of the elements that I attribute to work in this genre. You Don’t Love This Man is modernist in the sense that it interrogates one man’s thoughts and actions over the course of a single day (two of the most famous modernist works, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, also fit this profile), which just so happens to be the wedding day of his only daughter. Though the action of the novel takes place in the present tense, the past haunts it at every corner. Paul has taken the day of his daughter’s wedding off from work, but ends up being called in when his branch gets robbed. Paul realizes that the man in the robbery photos is the same one who robbed him twenty-five years ago, an event which was instrumental in solidifying his relationship with the woman who would be the mother of his only child, as well as the man who would be his friend until he started dating his daughter. The investigation of the robbery, as well as a missing bride, provide the author plenty of opportunity for explanatory flashbacks, all of which seem to propel the book forward towards some kind of grand conclusion.

             

It is this aspect of pacing, I think, that makes the novel seem different to me: it’s slow and steady, yet seems to build towards a crescendo which, most likely purposefully, never arrives. I won’t give the ending away (part of the book’s beauty is this feeling of moving towards something big) except to say that DeWeese does not provide easy answers, or concede to readers’ desires for all the threads to tie up (with one exception). What emerges is a pattern. Life has one, DeWeese seems to say, but its particularities may or may not mean anything. This idea reminds me of what I took to be Somerset Maugham’s message in Of Human Bondage, another modernist text. The notion of life as “a Persian rug,” passed on to Philip by a drunken painter he reveres as a kind of sage, seems to fit DeWeese’s book quite well. The novel is “modernist” in this sense, then, too: life may not contain a meaning, but it is full of beauty and worthy of our curiosity. For Paul, that seems to be enough. After all, what choice do we have but to live?  

To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

1960

USA

“All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbor was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.”

I have to tell you something that might upset you: Until now, I had never read To Kill a Mockingbird. 

 Don’t stop reading! I know you might find my confession shocking, appalling even. Many do (though not so much as the news that, until very recently, I had also never seen Star Wars). But please, don’t hold it against me. As I often tell people, “I was never made to read a book in high school” - a true, if not altogether fair, statement.

            Now I have read the famous book thanks to my friend, Turner (find his excellent blog about being an “adjunct” librarian at deweysnotdead.blogspot.com) who bought it for me on one of our recent jaunts to a local organic – I mean independent – bookstore. (I said the Bay area had superior indie bookstores and Turner is attempting to prove me wrong, with lots of fun, if little success). So, for the past couple weeks I’ve been falling asleep with a chapter or two of Scout, Atticus, and Jem Finch’s adventures in Maycomb County.  Now that I’ve read the book I’m no longer surprised that it was not an assigned text in my hometown. It uses the “N word” a lot, for one thing. For another, I think most folks in my town would probably not appreciate the insinuation from the author that the Finches, due primarily to Atticus’s education, are better than the average, everyday Joe. I mean, they don’t even go to church.

            My take on the book, at least the one I feel most interested in pursuing right now, is that it is about class, much more so than race. Of course it is. “The thing about it is, our kind of folks don’t like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don’t like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate and despise the colored folks” (229). The problem is not just racial prejudice, it’s prejudice in general – How can her teacher hate Hitler for killing Jews when she herself despises the black people in her own town? Scout wants to know. This is a complex question without a simple answer or a happy ending for (most – the altruistic Finches, of course, being the exception) white people – not the kind of thing I was taught to think about in high school. In fact, many of Scout’s observations about education might well be applied to my own, and while her experience is presented with humor rather than overt criticism, it is by no means held up as a shining beacon of truth and tolerance. “Why [the teacher] frowned when a child recited from The Grit Paper I never knew, but in some way it was associated with liking fiddling, eating syrupy biscuits for lunch, being a holy-roller, singing Sweetly Sings the Donkey and pronouncing it dunkey, all of which the state paid teachers to discourage” (247) – an indictment of small-town social/moral indoctrination if I ever heard one.

            The problem with the book, for me, is that Atticus is too perfect. I found myself admiring him, as the author clearly wants me to, but grudgingly. He’s too calm, too heroic. He’s the Jesus figure of the novel, a secular Jesus for the bleeding heart liberals on the coasts (is what some people I know might have said). Scout is too smart, her eyes too keen. What child understands and notices as much about the paradoxes of humanity as Scout does? Even the mysterious shut-in, Boo Radley, is unrealistically selfless and caring. (Boy, I sure do sound cynical, don’t I?) In fact, everyone in the book is pretty damn wholesome, despite the author’s frequent protestations to the contrary. Everybody, that is, except Bob Ewell; the villain of the novel ultimately gets his just desserts by “falling on his knife” and dying (Did Boo kill him? Or was it really Jem? Am I supposed to know?), a reasonably satisfying ending, I suppose, and certainly one with a clear moral message: prejudices kill not only the victims, but the perpetrators, too.           

I enjoyed the novel, and getting to know the characters in it. I think it is a good book that raises important and interesting questions in a charming and unexpected way. These are all excellent accomplishments. But I can’t help thinking that I would have appreciated it more had I read it when I was younger, less informed, and more hopeful.

            Please don’t stop reading if by this post I’ve cut a tiny hole in one of your favorite literary memories. Instead, tell me why I’m wrong and what I’m missing here. Thanks for reading. :)