one whole book
I hate to brag but I just finished a novel. Reading one I mean. That's right, one whole book. [Smirks, dusts hands] I read it sort of like chainsmoking in that I’m in the middle of another novel. The other novel is The Shape of the Ruins which is very good but very much a slow burn and very long - a cigar, in the chainsmoking metaphor - and the slowness and sense of it being long is extended by this being I think my third time through the first part. That’s a me thing not a thing about the novel - I just have tended to get slower in the middle and busier with the work and the library only lets me renew it so many times and by the time I get it back out I forget what page I’m on. If this happens again I’ll write down the page number this time (will I though? really? signs point to no). This way of reading the book is pleasurable actually, it extends the slow burn gradual build up of tension quality of the book, maybe I’ll just read the first half of this book over and over again for the rest of my life. I’m at peace with that. Anyway I was at the library grabbing holds for my wife or kids or both, I forget, and I saw this novel The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson and, frankly, I liked the cover - bright red! big letters! lightning bolts! - which as everyone knows is how one should always judge a book. I think I started it yesterday, maybe day before, and I finished it today.
I am not a culture understander so no claims of any sort on my part about it except to say that I liked it. Page-turnery. Compelling. I like the characters, the concept is neat, etc. Your mileage may vary, not least because it’s very violent and also very bleak.
I would someday like to be a culture understander, I fantasize about reading lots of Raymond Williams and whoever else has understood culture, especially literature (I assume Williams is not the only culture understander who has existed, but far be it from me as a non-understander to claim to know the fields of culturology and novel studies or whatever fiction experts call their discipline). On the other hand, not being a culture understander leaves me free to indulge my narcissism - what greater freedom is there?! truly a gift! - by treating cultural objects as mirrors I use to look at myself.
So a few things I liked in the book. There’s some passing themes of race and class and of the role of expert knowledge in rationalizing certain kinds of violence - like how ‘adverse reactions’ is a cold and distant name for very personal harms some people suffer due to medicine and experimentation. I care about all of that stuff and it was good to read about it, feel a sense of similar values with the author.
I am in general something of a fan of bleak apocalyptic fiction. I’ve read a lot zombie novels, for instance, and I was glad to have watched the Barry Hines film Threads, examining the harms of nuclear apocalypse especially on ordinary people in Sheffield. This sort of work is easy to call pull no punches kind of work. I think a reader or film viewer might well say ‘fair enough but I don’t want a work to punch me at all, whether pulled or followed through’ and rightly so - there’s nothing virtuous to liking unpleasant, pummeling art.
I think at the moment the Night of the Living Dead quality of the book hit differently in that I’ve got both the pandemic and the ongoing bombing of Gaza on my mind. One thought I had is that the scale of destruction this book depicts - and the relentlessness of that destruction, no one is spared, kinda thing - is in its broadest strokes a kind of realism: apocalypse fiction is in a sense a depiction of what’s already happening, just changing to whom and the specific mechanism. Walter Benjamin says something similar, something like ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the current emergency we live in is not the exception but the norm.’ He writes as well something like ‘that things just go on, that is the crisis.’ Peter Frase has a good book called Four Futures that uses fictional accounts of alternate futures to lay out possibilities of where we’re heading, from degrees of utopian to dystopian. It can also be read as giving an account of the range of social fates to which different people are allocated right now. There’s a bit in The Loop that mentions hell on earth as either coming as having just come about in the disaster it depicts (the book is a sort of bioweapon-gets-out-of-control military industrial complex story meets zombie apocalypse story, set on a small enough scale - one town - to be a character and plot-driven adventure story) and reading that I thought, well, in important ways at the moment ‘hell on earth’ is redundant because already here and really the sufferings imagined in versions of hell and what can be called hellscapes are depictions of things that are at least in the neighborhood with things that have already happened.
Having had that thought, I wondered, why, living through a nightmare, and feeling a little hellworn for witnessing it, would I want to read a hell on earth sort of story? Ditto why watch all those Ken Loach movies, being less obviously violent but much more obviously sad? I think the reason is maybe three things. One, it’s just compelling, well done art. That’s not a sufficient answer though, because why this art, now? Two, in the worlds of the these works the violence is shown to be violence, rather than being occluded and excused as with the official stories of both the covid pandemic and the war on Gaza. These works of art depict unpleasant worlds but worlds that make sense, they don’t have the kind of ‘how can this happen?!’ feeling of shock that the actual world brings on, even (or really, especially) when it involves events like what happens in these bleak fictions. Three, and closely related, I think, these works are a way to feel in community with people who care about this sort of awfulness, and specifically a community that has some kind of consensus and a solid one, and a respectable one (being, as I am, a respecter of novelists), whereas in the actual world there’s a significant lack of such consensus in a deeply painful way.
I think that lack of consensus - that the horrors are denied and one has to push against that denial, to know that one is on the other side of a chasm from many people as someone who recognizes and opposes the horrors - makes the awfulness of the world even harder to take, like wearing a sweater on a very hot day. I’m not sure why and I could be wrong, as usual and especially today: I’m worn out, from the hellscape, from the semester and the time in the semester I’m at, from some budgetary tensions at work and inadequate responses to those tensions, from some cool but tiring family stuff and also, frankly, because I’ve just started back to a little more serious exercise (serious for me, I mean) and I’m feeling the physical fatigue, all of which adds up to a sense that I’m thinking in the dark on a foggy night. Hence hiding by reading a novel, entering a bright energetic pageturner world as a way to have a feeling of forward motion, intellectual energy, and unambiguous moral community rather than feeling like one has to carve out the space to think and feel - this metaphor may not work but I sort of feel like I need a library to explore and get curious as well as a funeral home in order to grieve but to have either I’d have to help dig the foundation and build the building first, and there’s so little time anyway (unless I procrastinate, as with these last two days of novel reading while emails stack up. a sort of borrowing time from the future, an impulse buy I’ll repay with interest later), whereas the book offers a version of both already readymade.
Hmm, here's a thought. If pageturner books are cigarettes and literary novels are cigars, what's my book and the sorts of stuff I usually read? I don't know and worse yet, now I want to smoke, partly just to be outside and to have something to do with my hands and for the mental focus.