This 2016 novel is a mashup of ideas from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five), Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), and P.D. Ouspensky (A New Model of the Universe). Wray probes Time, and the possibilities of time travel and what that might mean to the power-hungry, through the lives of a singular family.
The Lost Time Accidents are the grail pursued by the offspring of Ottokar Gottfried Toula, a Czech gherkin-maker with a hobbyist's interest in time. In 1903 he discovers something about its nature, writes a few cryptic sentences, and is hit by a car and dies before he can explain further. His sons, Kaspar and Waldemar, move to Vienna and study physics. Their work coincides with publication of the Theory of General Relativity; the family feels Einstein has trespassed on their understanding of time, and ever after, they refer to him only as the Patent Clerk. Contempt for him feeds Waldemar's anti-Semitism.
Kaspar and Waldemar part on chilly terms as students: Kaspar marries the daughter of his Jewish professor, and Waldemar decamps to Czechoslovakia where privation begins his transformation into the monster he will become, the Nazis' Black Timekeeper of Czas, performing unspeakable experiments on Jewish subjects in a camp where he has complete autonomy. Kaspar and Sonja and their twin daughters leave Vienna as Nazism descends. Sonja dies en route to America, and Kaspar takes the girls to Buffalo where he joins a watchmaking company. He marries again eventually, and his son Orson, raised primarily by the twins, becomes a prolific author of pornographic sci-fi, his output reminiscent of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. These twins, Enzian and Gentian, function as an isolated dyad, Enzian the theorist and Gentian the practical one; they decamp to a building in Harlem where they can pursue their experiments, Enzian thinking and studying and working on time travel devices while Gentian becomes a local character, enjoying city life on her shopping expeditions.
Orson finally writes a real novel, a thinly-disguised account of his eccentric family and their preoccupation with time, which because it is published in 1969, becomes a runaway bestseller. The Revelations-like final section spurs formation of a cult, the U.S. Church of Synchronology (UCS), derisively dubbed the Fuzzy Fruits by Orson. He marries a student boarding at his house, and they have a son, named Waldemar by Enzian and Gentian. This young man is the narrator of this tale, and it falls to him to find the solution to his great-grandfather's Lost Time Accidents, and to discover how his namesake disappeared when the prison camp he ran was liberated by the Soviets. The story is told, in alternating sections, as a family history and a series of letters - confessions might be a better word - to his clandestine lover, the wife of the founder of the UCS.
If all that sounds convoluted, it is. To Wray's credit, he dodges the main pitfall of time travel stories: altering the past which alters the present. And he's a witty and vivid writer:
"The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself."
But Wray does enough name-dropping (Sonja models for Gustav Klimt, and Kaspar sits in on a discussion between Wittgenstein and another luminary) to remind me of people who've done past-life regressions and concluded they were Cleopatra, Napoleon, Michelangelo - never anyone ordinary.
In a mystery, which this story is in essence, it's important that the resolution be worth the effort it takes to get there. Well, not for me. Maybe Mr. Wray should read some more Ouspensky, or study Vonnegut's storytelling art. Vonnegut, you see, doesn't do suspense. He'll tell you in the moment of introducing someone, how and when that character dies, or accomplishes something or fails to. This frees him from the burden of coming up with a blockbuster climax, and allows the reader to focus on other aspects of the story. Not a bad strategy, when you don't have a breakthrough vision.
In which NC Weil reviews books and films, and considers this amazing world.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance
This memoir of a chaotic childhood, told by a survivor, is not the first, nor final, glimpse into an American subculture that in many ways resists attempts to improve the lives of its denizens. I'm sure Vance would agree that you can take poor Scots-Irish families out of the Appalachian hollers, but you can't take the hollers out of those families.
His mother, a drug addict with numerous failed marriages, dragged J.D. and his older sister through her minefield of a life. Her parents, his beloved Mamaw and Papaw, despite screaming fights, were the shelter from stormy lives that the children needed. Hillbilly culture took pride in rebellion, in avenging one's honor, in family loyalty, and in never admitting the desperation of one's circumstances. A mom's apology and kind acts were ploys to let your guard down, so she could damage you. Mamaw, who threatened many people with a gun and as a girl did shoot someone, forced Papaw to move out when his drinking became intolerable - then he spent the next decade visiting every day to play cards and watch TV with her.
Vance stresses that until his stint in the Marine Corps, he was unfocused and undisciplined. Surrendering body and mind to drill instructors simplified his life in liberating ways: their demands were immediate, imperative, impossible to ignore. When he did find himself with the leisure to reflect, he saw that he could drive himself the way they did, and succeed where the devastation of his family life predicted failure.
In his summing-up, he discusses the psychological effects of violence, physical and verbal; substance abuse; splintered families; and an insular culture of very low expectations. I was reminded of studies of people displaced from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - though they missed their families and friends, those who stayed away have fared much better economically and socially than those who returned.
Vance makes the point that Section 8 (subsidized) housing, when concentrated in specific urban areas, exacerbates poverty. It is when children of poverty have schoolmates and neighbors in better circumstances, that they can see alternatives to their families' lives. This is not news. This truth stands behind the Brown vs Board of Education school desegregation decision of 1954, that declared separate to be inherently unequal.
Schools are in the main as segregated now, economically and racially, as they were when the Supreme Court heard that case. Erosion of support for public schools intensifies this inequality: private schools can deny admission to a student based on misbehavior, physical or mental challenges, or poverty. Public schools must accept any student, no matter how troublesome his/her circumstances. While teachers' unions have become the whipping-boy of conservatives, teachers themselves cope every day with students who have unstable, dangerous lives, who may be hungry, traumatized, afraid to go home, and who are likely to react violently to perceived slights or threats. They are ill-equipped to benefit from efforts to educate them. "Saving money" by packing more students per classroom virtually guarantees failure.
Educate means "to lead out" - but that can only work when children have supporters: a teacher who takes time to show interest; a loving family member who provides safe haven in a chaotic upbringing; someone who expects more than the minimum; examples close to hand of people who have escaped the cycles of ruin, and now thrive.
Funding for HeadStart, and for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) - parent of AmeriCorps, Teach for America, VISTA, City Year, Senior Corps, and other community supports that send volunteers into underserved areas to devise programs and strategies to break the downward trajectory of young people - is under threat from politicians in the guise of "saving money" by kicking children's problems down the road, where they become more severe and intractable.
It is a terrible irony that the very people most in need of such programs swung the 2016 elections in favor of a candidate moving as fast as possible to dismantle the last shreds of their safety net. At least we're bringing back for-profit prisons - good to know the Trump Administration has a destination for these folks.
His mother, a drug addict with numerous failed marriages, dragged J.D. and his older sister through her minefield of a life. Her parents, his beloved Mamaw and Papaw, despite screaming fights, were the shelter from stormy lives that the children needed. Hillbilly culture took pride in rebellion, in avenging one's honor, in family loyalty, and in never admitting the desperation of one's circumstances. A mom's apology and kind acts were ploys to let your guard down, so she could damage you. Mamaw, who threatened many people with a gun and as a girl did shoot someone, forced Papaw to move out when his drinking became intolerable - then he spent the next decade visiting every day to play cards and watch TV with her.
Vance stresses that until his stint in the Marine Corps, he was unfocused and undisciplined. Surrendering body and mind to drill instructors simplified his life in liberating ways: their demands were immediate, imperative, impossible to ignore. When he did find himself with the leisure to reflect, he saw that he could drive himself the way they did, and succeed where the devastation of his family life predicted failure.
In his summing-up, he discusses the psychological effects of violence, physical and verbal; substance abuse; splintered families; and an insular culture of very low expectations. I was reminded of studies of people displaced from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - though they missed their families and friends, those who stayed away have fared much better economically and socially than those who returned.
Vance makes the point that Section 8 (subsidized) housing, when concentrated in specific urban areas, exacerbates poverty. It is when children of poverty have schoolmates and neighbors in better circumstances, that they can see alternatives to their families' lives. This is not news. This truth stands behind the Brown vs Board of Education school desegregation decision of 1954, that declared separate to be inherently unequal.
Schools are in the main as segregated now, economically and racially, as they were when the Supreme Court heard that case. Erosion of support for public schools intensifies this inequality: private schools can deny admission to a student based on misbehavior, physical or mental challenges, or poverty. Public schools must accept any student, no matter how troublesome his/her circumstances. While teachers' unions have become the whipping-boy of conservatives, teachers themselves cope every day with students who have unstable, dangerous lives, who may be hungry, traumatized, afraid to go home, and who are likely to react violently to perceived slights or threats. They are ill-equipped to benefit from efforts to educate them. "Saving money" by packing more students per classroom virtually guarantees failure.
Educate means "to lead out" - but that can only work when children have supporters: a teacher who takes time to show interest; a loving family member who provides safe haven in a chaotic upbringing; someone who expects more than the minimum; examples close to hand of people who have escaped the cycles of ruin, and now thrive.
Funding for HeadStart, and for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) - parent of AmeriCorps, Teach for America, VISTA, City Year, Senior Corps, and other community supports that send volunteers into underserved areas to devise programs and strategies to break the downward trajectory of young people - is under threat from politicians in the guise of "saving money" by kicking children's problems down the road, where they become more severe and intractable.
It is a terrible irony that the very people most in need of such programs swung the 2016 elections in favor of a candidate moving as fast as possible to dismantle the last shreds of their safety net. At least we're bringing back for-profit prisons - good to know the Trump Administration has a destination for these folks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)