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You can see the influence--not all to the good, but neither all to the bad, I must repeat to myself--of David Foster Wallace, and of the 'modern' prose style... witty, impressively exact, yet somehow lacking in depth.
MC is not a tasteful person, and in some ways it bothers me that he is a 'writer,' or that he is our modern iteration. He writes of comic books, geekiness (of a kind which doesn't really exist in the same way anymore--Dr. Who loving liberal parents), of bad entertainment. But hold onto that for a moment....
He is one of a generation of liberal Jewish men who take Obama seriously and revile Bush, who smoked marijuana as young people and have grown out of it, who sentimentally value their WASPy in-laws, who regard themselves as feminists, who call their younger male selves 'little shits,' who admire some women and in fact morally exalt them (I'm thinking of his essay about the writer's workshop), who regard parenthood as a losing battle. This kind of totally negated masculinity grosses me out, or it feels somehow inhuman, like he has unlearned an important aspect of perception: the need for transcendence... I feel like the tendency for abstraction is one of the highest and most noble features of the species, and as something to which we should aspire, and one which requires that we be rather serious and purposeful and dedicated when it clashes with reality. You have high ideals as your compensation for the difficulties of life, and the other way around, too. Whereas his way of dealing with things feels like he just wants to talk about difficulty, share in them, lower himself, feel better as part of an emotionally available collective. Which may work to salve the troubles of life in the same way a philosophy or religion would, but is hostile to them--aren't they a good in themselves?
Why then five stars? Well, there are a few very, very good essays. On Legos, on Captain Underpants, on the march of time, on his first girlfriend and the time he had sex with one of his mother's friends, I think there were others. I guess I am discovering that I really love these sort of memoir-essays, and I love them not just when they come from library-dwellers like Judt and Sacks but from anyone who can conceive of an orignal idea, or who writes well.... (Does he write well? He's good at something, and sometimes it's very good, but it seems lacking in depth. True quality goes beyond the easy beauty of symmetry, geometry, exactness into the weird world of uneven perfection. Behind the artifice is a deeper order... There's an ugliness in Judt or Orwell or the memos of Donald Rumsfeld that somehow better writing than the (literally) amazing pyrotechnics of Chabon or DFW or whatever.)
Maybe part of the reason that MC seems to be lacking in depth is that, for as much as he can say interesting things about his life, as much as he says wise things even, he doesn't seem to live wisely.... Instead, he seems achingly typical, in the sense of 'of a type.'
Maybe I am more forgiving because he represents a kind of intelligent liberal parent that I wish I had had--he seems like a really good parent, and reminds me of the parents of friends who I don't think appreciate their parents enough.... More than that, he represents a time, specifically a time when the mid-to-late-aughts was still continuous with the nineties, even after 9/11, before the digital world colonized consciousness, where human life was still somewhat tethered to reality, rather than being purely discursive, virtual. Somehow this represents a kind of safety and goodness to me, for reasons mostly personal. He himself talks about it in terms of the destruction of childhood and play (but again doesn't have the courage of his convictions--he, after all, follows his biking daughter in his car). There is something unspoilt in his life.... He describes multiple times that he is naturally cheery and upbeat*, but also focusedly literal: He somehow lives his life by dealing with things before him (this is part of his lack of the spiritual, like some deficit in what he can perceive of invisible things), and I guess to me that evokes someone who is not being gnawed on by a constant background anxiety, one that I want to attribute to globalization, the knowledge that there is a best somewhere, and it's not where you are--economic globalization in so much as we're all competing with eachother, and informational globaliziation insomuch as we now know about those bests because of the Internet (especially, they're made vivid by video), and can't ever rest easy, really can hardly even respect ourselves, what we're doing is not fundamentally OK, the terms in which the people around us deal are irrelevant, we need to be searching and judging ourselves using standards from without... relaxing here may feel good but in fact it's not earned because in a sense the world before us is an illusion: the real world is at a few universities, in a few American or global cities....
I am also troubled by the fact that I recognize part of myself in the young Chabon.... I am always wigged out when people go through a philosophical education--he mentions he was once a logical positivist, and you can see it in his lack of taste... you know, DFW did the same kind of desiccated analytic philosophy--but then seem like they didn't absorb any of its virtues....
I guess this is the sort of book that I would read for fun, I have always been looking for those. These memoir-essays... I often feel like I can't trust my senses of things, and have taste actually because in some ways I'm completely unreceptive to what's supposed to be the object-level entertainment of things, and therefore don't dismiss or endorse things on that non-cognitive basis. I still don't think I understand the idea of reading for pleasure; I feel like I do things partly out of a bored compulsion for stimulation (which isn't even really taking an action so much as being involved in one) and partly out of a superegoistic sense that I must not waste my time. But I did just really like these essays, will return to them, some had good ideas....
Sad that he doesn't have more nonfiction titles. I have half a sense (but only half a sense) that some of the writers currently writing in the purely 'literary fiction' genre are less likely to be writing truly good fiction than half-commercial people like Chabon. There is something in the craftsmenship, the sense that you're doing something for a job, that gives it a kind of structure or 'genre' out of which the sublime is likely to emerge, in a way that in fact outstrips the workaday potboiler-peddling author's ability to write about (even understand) what is so good about the work. It's when you understand the work as something more that you might get trapped in 'Interpretation,' in the way Saint Sontag would derisively characterize it. I guess all of this has been said before. But I feel like a kind of liveliness or vitality prerequisite to writing great works, and that's at odds with the crushing self-knowledge (self-consciousness) I associate with people who are concerned only with literary fiction.
(*=is that the key to the sustainability of this negativistic ideology's dominance? That among the most successful--those most able to afford the 'luxury beliefs,'--the cost of negative beliefs is low, because the people who would hold them are naturally sanguine?)
MC is not a tasteful person, and in some ways it bothers me that he is a 'writer,' or that he is our modern iteration. He writes of comic books, geekiness (of a kind which doesn't really exist in the same way anymore--Dr. Who loving liberal parents), of bad entertainment. But hold onto that for a moment....
He is one of a generation of liberal Jewish men who take Obama seriously and revile Bush, who smoked marijuana as young people and have grown out of it, who sentimentally value their WASPy in-laws, who regard themselves as feminists, who call their younger male selves 'little shits,' who admire some women and in fact morally exalt them (I'm thinking of his essay about the writer's workshop), who regard parenthood as a losing battle. This kind of totally negated masculinity grosses me out, or it feels somehow inhuman, like he has unlearned an important aspect of perception: the need for transcendence... I feel like the tendency for abstraction is one of the highest and most noble features of the species, and as something to which we should aspire, and one which requires that we be rather serious and purposeful and dedicated when it clashes with reality. You have high ideals as your compensation for the difficulties of life, and the other way around, too. Whereas his way of dealing with things feels like he just wants to talk about difficulty, share in them, lower himself, feel better as part of an emotionally available collective. Which may work to salve the troubles of life in the same way a philosophy or religion would, but is hostile to them--aren't they a good in themselves?
Why then five stars? Well, there are a few very, very good essays. On Legos, on Captain Underpants, on the march of time, on his first girlfriend and the time he had sex with one of his mother's friends, I think there were others. I guess I am discovering that I really love these sort of memoir-essays, and I love them not just when they come from library-dwellers like Judt and Sacks but from anyone who can conceive of an orignal idea, or who writes well.... (Does he write well? He's good at something, and sometimes it's very good, but it seems lacking in depth. True quality goes beyond the easy beauty of symmetry, geometry, exactness into the weird world of uneven perfection. Behind the artifice is a deeper order... There's an ugliness in Judt or Orwell or the memos of Donald Rumsfeld that somehow better writing than the (literally) amazing pyrotechnics of Chabon or DFW or whatever.)
Maybe part of the reason that MC seems to be lacking in depth is that, for as much as he can say interesting things about his life, as much as he says wise things even, he doesn't seem to live wisely.... Instead, he seems achingly typical, in the sense of 'of a type.'
Maybe I am more forgiving because he represents a kind of intelligent liberal parent that I wish I had had--he seems like a really good parent, and reminds me of the parents of friends who I don't think appreciate their parents enough.... More than that, he represents a time, specifically a time when the mid-to-late-aughts was still continuous with the nineties, even after 9/11, before the digital world colonized consciousness, where human life was still somewhat tethered to reality, rather than being purely discursive, virtual. Somehow this represents a kind of safety and goodness to me, for reasons mostly personal. He himself talks about it in terms of the destruction of childhood and play (but again doesn't have the courage of his convictions--he, after all, follows his biking daughter in his car). There is something unspoilt in his life.... He describes multiple times that he is naturally cheery and upbeat*, but also focusedly literal: He somehow lives his life by dealing with things before him (this is part of his lack of the spiritual, like some deficit in what he can perceive of invisible things), and I guess to me that evokes someone who is not being gnawed on by a constant background anxiety, one that I want to attribute to globalization, the knowledge that there is a best somewhere, and it's not where you are--economic globalization in so much as we're all competing with eachother, and informational globaliziation insomuch as we now know about those bests because of the Internet (especially, they're made vivid by video), and can't ever rest easy, really can hardly even respect ourselves, what we're doing is not fundamentally OK, the terms in which the people around us deal are irrelevant, we need to be searching and judging ourselves using standards from without... relaxing here may feel good but in fact it's not earned because in a sense the world before us is an illusion: the real world is at a few universities, in a few American or global cities....
I am also troubled by the fact that I recognize part of myself in the young Chabon.... I am always wigged out when people go through a philosophical education--he mentions he was once a logical positivist, and you can see it in his lack of taste... you know, DFW did the same kind of desiccated analytic philosophy--but then seem like they didn't absorb any of its virtues....
I guess this is the sort of book that I would read for fun, I have always been looking for those. These memoir-essays... I often feel like I can't trust my senses of things, and have taste actually because in some ways I'm completely unreceptive to what's supposed to be the object-level entertainment of things, and therefore don't dismiss or endorse things on that non-cognitive basis. I still don't think I understand the idea of reading for pleasure; I feel like I do things partly out of a bored compulsion for stimulation (which isn't even really taking an action so much as being involved in one) and partly out of a superegoistic sense that I must not waste my time. But I did just really like these essays, will return to them, some had good ideas....
Sad that he doesn't have more nonfiction titles. I have half a sense (but only half a sense) that some of the writers currently writing in the purely 'literary fiction' genre are less likely to be writing truly good fiction than half-commercial people like Chabon. There is something in the craftsmenship, the sense that you're doing something for a job, that gives it a kind of structure or 'genre' out of which the sublime is likely to emerge, in a way that in fact outstrips the workaday potboiler-peddling author's ability to write about (even understand) what is so good about the work. It's when you understand the work as something more that you might get trapped in 'Interpretation,' in the way Saint Sontag would derisively characterize it. I guess all of this has been said before. But I feel like a kind of liveliness or vitality prerequisite to writing great works, and that's at odds with the crushing self-knowledge (self-consciousness) I associate with people who are concerned only with literary fiction.
(*=is that the key to the sustainability of this negativistic ideology's dominance? That among the most successful--those most able to afford the 'luxury beliefs,'--the cost of negative beliefs is low, because the people who would hold them are naturally sanguine?)