I Am NOT the Beastmaster

All Policing is Local

King Suckerman and Hard Revolution, by George Pelecanos

Sometimes I get the feeling that George Pelecanos writes his novels with an ADC map book close at hand.  In addition to writing and producing The Wire--he got all the gut-wrenching penultimate episodes--he's the author of sixteen crime novels set in and around Washington, DC.  And his geography is impeccable; you could navigate the greater DC metropolitan area using nothing but Pelecanos books.

That's not always to their credit.  This passage from King Suckerman crystallized the doubts that nagged at me throughout the novel:

They drove north on Wisconsin Avenue, out of the city.  Vivian bent forward to light a cigarette in the wind, and when it had burned down to the filter she lit another off the first.  She didn't try to argue or make conversation with Karras.  Wisconsin Avenue became Rockville Pike.

"Go right there," said Vivian, and Karras turned east onto Randolph Road.

They got over to Viers Mill and made another turn, entering a neighborhood of smallish houses originally offered to World War II veterans on the GI Bill.  Vivian was in the place in which she had been raised.

Anybody can follow that route to Vivian's neighborhood; I could even tell you what it looks like today.  But until Pelecanos feeds us that one thin line about the smallish houses and the GI Bill, I have absolutely no idea what it looked like in 1976 or who lived there, or what sets it apart from the novel's other locations that are equally defined by their street names and little else.  Pelecanos is renowned for writing about the DC you don't see much of in popular culture, the one that extends far beyond Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, but King Suckerman pursues its geographic precision at the expense of the human detail that could bring that city to life.

That's a shame, because the book has great promise as prose blaxploitation set at blaxploitation's height.  (Pelecanos lavishes enough attention to the city's vanished movie houses that I had to get this book for Christmas.)  He gives us a wonderful description of an invented movie that reads like a surreal cross between Superfly and Bertolt Brecht, and the finale captures something of the freewheeling anarchy of DC on a Fourth of July, but otherwise King Suckerman comes across as less than the sum of its meticulously itemized cinematic, musical, and cartographic influences.

Hard Revolution, written several years later, does a much better job of setting the place without relying on street names.  The book still has a couple of ADC passages ("They walked the east side of Georgia's 6200 block...") but Pelecanos spends more time evoking an even more alien city, DC in early April, 1968, just before and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I may not be the most reliable judge here.  When Pelecanos describes a chop shop in a lonely stretch of cinderblock and gravel in P.G. County, back when the county was home to white bikers instead of upscale black professionals--that's my neighborhood, and I can still see a few garages that might have stood alongside (if not inspired) Pelecanos's locale.  When he records a rally on the steps of Douglass Hall at Howard University--I teach classes there, and I can picture the students filling The Yard.  When he locates Derek Strange's apartment building "on the northeast corner of 13th and Clifton, just above Cardozo High School"--I have been in that building, and I've seen the million-dollar view that keeps Strange there.  (On the Fourth of July, no less, lining my experience up with King Suckerman, whose climax unfolds just on the other side of Meridian Hill Park.)  I can't evaluate the Pelecanos novels with any objectivity because I sit right in the bullseye for their ideal audience.  I can't walk away from DC any more easily than Strange can give up his view.

But the local color serves a purpose in Hard Revolution that it was missing in King Suckerman, possibly because Suckerman was about small-time criminals and Revolution is about police.  Pelecanos cops don't solve crimes through their ability to spot seemingly innocuous details, deduce improbable chains of events, or read a man's life story from the soil tracked on his shoe.  They don't solve crimes through any special knack for getting knocked on the head while shuttling from social caste to social caste either, although you might expect that would be closer to Pelecanos's generic turf.  His detectives, police or private, solve crimes because they are all DC locals who can draw on lifelong professional and social networks to identify and locate their suspects.  Detective work is a matter of diligently checking in with contacts, or making new ones, a social rather than intellectual trade.  In Hard Revolution, a robbery is foiled because a liquor-store employee happens to know one of DC's first black police officers through neighborhood ties; he also, completely by chance, knows Strange's father through the local American Legion post.  (This raises a question you could build another novel around--what the hell was going on in a black American Legion post in 1950s DC?--but that ground is left untrodden.)  In Pelecanos's world all policing is local, and you can't solve or punish a crime if you're not fully at home in the city where it's committed.

The novel has other virtues.  Even non-DC lifers should be able to appreciate Hard Revolution's urgent blending of personal and public history as it chronicles the days (shockingly few) between LBJ's declaration that he would not run for re-election and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  The riots that followed King's assassination were the most significant event to befall DC in the last sixty or seventy years; some neighborhoods still have yet to recover.  Pelecanos smartly intercuts the national and local tragedies with the more personal but equally devastating traumas that befall Derek Strange and his family.  The sprawling, citywide nature of the riots puts his penchant for geographic minutiae to good use, and he chronicles the spreading violence with admirable clarity.  He also identifies those parties most responsible for the local breakdown without passing easy judgment on them; he simply tracks their actions and lets their incompetence or posturing or inability to foresee the consequences speak for themselves.  (Stokely Carmichael does not come off well, nor does the Metropolitan Police Department.  I do wish he showed us the confrontation between Walter Washington and J. Edgar Hoover that he alludes to here--that would have been fantastic.)

Hard Revolution is far from perfect--it has a long, aimless prologue and a formulaic salt-and-pepper cop friendship, neither of which go anywhere--but it becomes a lot more than just another ADC crime novel.  By writing the story of the 1968 riots, Pelecanos has recorded the terrible birth of the modern DC.

Cocks and Bulls

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Martin Rowson
Tristram Shandy:  A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom

I wish I had minded what I was about when I encountered, on two different occasions last week, two different modern adaptations of Mr. Laurence Sterne's classic eighteenth-century parody Tristram Shandy:—had I considered that not merely a few evenings' pleasant diversion but the production of a rational Blog Entry was concern'd in it, this review should have made quite a different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see it.

I'd been looking foward to one of those adaptations for some time.  Martin Rowson's graphic novel treatment of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which converts the classic poem of modernist angst into a hard-boiled detective story starring a Robert Mitchum lookalike, is one of the wittiest comics ever written.  His version of Tristram Shandy does not disappoint; like the earlier Waste Land (which receives a quick nod or two), it captures the most important qualities of the original while tossing out deadly accurate send-ups of other works of art, literature, and popular culture.  But the bar has been raised somewhat higher.  In The Waste Land, the mere act of quotation served as a clever formal analogue to and parody of Eliot's densely allusive poem; in that sense no reference could ever seem out of place. Tristram Shandy, however, adapts a much earlier and less frantically allusive work--in the wrong hands the extranarrative quotations might seem anachronistic, even desperate.  Somehow, though, they never come to that; lacking the formalistic excuse of his Eliot adaptation, Rowson's manic references instead replicate the freewheeling spirit and the endlessly self-devouring self-awareness of Sterne's tale.

The quotations aren't just anachronistic, they're completely anarchic.  Narrator Tristram Shandy leads us through his conception, birth, christening, and accidental circumcision by windowpane while taking countless digressions into matters geneaological, historical, theological, metatextual, and scatological.  With this as his source material, Rowson can blend his inventions almost seamlessly into Sterne's style no matter how jarring the change in cultural register:  thus the faux George Harriman page or the Oliver Stone film version.  (Think Born on the Fourth of July for the latter, not JFK--it's surprisingly apt, given uncle Toby's condition, but then most of Rowson's jokes are.)

Nevertheless, the contemporary references become a little overbearing by the novel's end, where Rowson glosses over the last five volumes with a barrage of jokes about Martin Amis, Raymond Chandler, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Andrew Davies under the wafer-thin pretext that Tristram Shandy has been downloaded (or uploaded?) into cyberspace.  Those later volumes are a good place to cut material--although Rowson doesn't do justice to the Widow Wadman story--but the modern satires briefly eclipse the source material.

Fortunately, these japes are more than balanced by plenty of period-appropriate references, including some of the work's most impressive parodies:  A set of diagrams of seventeenth-century siege emplacements metamorphose into a wonderfully coarse sexual joke.  Ominous carceral landscapes from Piranesi represent the interior of a certain much-priz'd part of the male anatomy.  The digression-within-a-digression tale of Slawkenbergius is told through an art catalogue (a trick used to equally striking if less satiric effect in Tobias Tycho Schalken's Balthazar).  Best of all, though, are Rowson's many spot-on parodies of Hogarth's engravings.  The Hogarthian print is perfectly suited both to Rowson's antic, chicken fat-laden compositions and his fine-lined pen and ink style.  All of the Hogarth references are illustrated in suitably ludicrous detail; one even comes with mock Sean Shesgreen-style annotations.

If the pastiche does occasionally stray too far from the text of Tristram Shandy, it always remains true to the style.  Unlike Rowson's Waste Land, which seizes every opportunity to mock Eliot's poem for its deliberate inscrutability, his Tristram Shandy bears a genuine affection for its source and a winning desire to match or beat it at its own game.  (The bile is reserved for any academic or literary critic who presumes to analyze it.)  As Rowson tells his canine companion Pete, these self-conscious artistic digressions are perhaps the only way to adapt an arch, self-reflexive novel that's about the impossibility of writing a novel in the first place.

Before I'd finished the comic I stumbled across Michael Winterbottom's recent film adaptation Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which played in Nashville last week.  Winterbottom takes a similar approach to Rowson--much lighter on the allusions (everybody is lighter on the allusions than Martin Rowson) but just as self-conscious about the making of the movie as Rowson is about the composition of his comic, as Sterne is about the writing of the novel.  The movie stresses the impossibility of turning Tristram Shandy into a movie, especially in an industry that's established rigid and dreary formulas for the period piece.  A Cock and Bull Story hits on all of them, right down to the obligatory/gratuitous casting of the American actress (ably filled by Gillian Anderson, who doesn't even have the decency to be American).

The movie is funniest when the shooting of the Tristram Shandy movie-within-the-movie stops, and we follow lead Steve Coogan's attempts to quash a scandal, visit the mother of his child, hit on a sexy production assistant who's far too into German cinema, fund the movie, pretend he's read Tristram Shandy, and fend off a power play by very funny second lead Rob Brydon.  The industry critique isn't particularly cutting edge but the movie never pretends it's throwing bombs at the Man, always directing the mockery first and foremost at itself.  (Contrast with Swimming with Sharks, and pretty much every other "biting" Hollywood satire made in Hollywood.)

The Shandy adaptations, unfortunately, are less successful than the behind-the-scenes material.  The screenplay discards Sterne's language for a contemporary narration that manages to be more blunt and yet less direct than the vigorous if verbose eighteenth-century prose.  (Rowson keeps the original language, cutting out reams of it and saving the very best.)  The difference between our clumsy, modern euphemisms for penises and Sterne's flippant Georgian ones is profound; he seems less embarrassed by sex than we are, even with all those rows of *********************.

The movie's many digressions, self-reflexive jokes, and flights of fancy are more true to the novel, whether they operate through literal adaptations like the film equivalent of Sterne's famous black page (allow me to quote:

)

or inventions like the giant womb Coogan gets shoved into.  The truest Shandian humor, though, comes in the parts least tied to the novel.

Ultimately, both adaptations succeed because they're faithful to the spirit of Sterne's work.  But Rowson, working with a larger canvas, fewer time constraints, and no incentives to dumb down the material, manages to be faithful to the letter as well.

The Future Is Now

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Don De Lillo, Cosmopolis
Bruce Sterling, The Zenith Angle

I've been contemplating a lengthy analytical response to these books for weeks now.  (Months, in some cases.)  But the pieces I contemplate too long tend not to get written so you'll have to settle for this scattershot one in its place.

The desire to write what's now destined to be unwritten began with my disappointment at The Zenith Angle.  It's a toughening-the-geek novel and as such it's reminiscent, to its detriment, of the Randy Waterhouse sections of Neal Stephenson's vastly superior Cryptonomicon.  But this toughening-the-geek novel is set in the atmosphere of threatened, affronted masculinity following September 11, and so the geek's toughening is dangerously compliant with the strutting performances of our own once-prodigal commander-in-chief.

The book opens as IT genius Derek Vandeveer smugly surveys the spoils of a middle-class suburban dream he's achieved more by default than desire; he hasn't bothered furnishing his expensive new home, but he does love watching his highly degreed, recently fecund wife make him toast.  The September 11 attacks appear to jolt him out of this complacency but they only shake him loose from his dot-com job and into a Homeland Security gig.  At heart he still wants desperately to fulfill the most conservative definitions of husband, father, and man, even if it means abandoning his family; he can only conceive these roles by their clichés and he'll follow any script he's given to get them.

This might constitute a timely and acerbic satire if Sterling didn't appear to believe it.  Vandeveer might come in for some muted criticism on the domestic front, but politically nothing ever shakes the novel's investment in this narrative or implies its values aren't normative.  Other characters and events bend themselves to conform with Vandeveer's impoverished conception of himself: after he returns from his toughening for a day of sex in a millionaire's sleazy hot-tub pad, his wife actually says, "Well, hero, now you know what you were fighting for!"

That's just one of many moments that will briefly convince you you're reading one of those soft-core spy novels written by Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly, but it's not the worst.  Even though Sterling is skeptical about any government's ability to enforce global computer security he's extremely quiescent, occasionally outright boosterish, about the government's conduct post-9/11.  Donald Rumsfeld comes in for high praise, a not unrealistic stance for geeks to strike any time before, let's say, May of 2003; Rumsfeld's desire to modernize the armed forces would be well in keeping with their technocratic proclivities.  That still doesn't explain the rather cuddly portrayal of the Secretary of Defense's notoriously monomaniacal (and, as events continue to show us, tactically inept) managerial style.  We are told Rummy "had been ruthless" with Van's boss - by making him go on a regimen of doctor's checkups and "heart-safe exercises."  It's nice to know he cares so much about his subordinates' health, assuming they're stationed in the District of Columbia and not the Sunni triangle.

If references to Iraq seem out of place in this review, that's by Sterling's design - to his detriment, since the war in Iraq is the event that nullifies every glowing thing he has to say about the Bush government's security efforts. And, to be fair, it proves many of his critiques, albeit at a terrible cost - but Sterling cheats by avoiding the subject entirely, a ridiculous omission for a novel about national security and government policy that ends in fall 2002.  (He does write one scene featuring a spacey antiwar protester, but it's set too early for the Iraq protests and it conveniently avoids mentioning exactly what she's protesting.)  It's not a surprising avoidance: Iraq is where the insecure, overcompensating pseudomasculinity craved by Derek Vandeveer and exemplified by George W. Bush both leads and falters, leaving others to pick up the tab.

But Sterling still exalts the architects of that war, even when it or they are too repugnant for him to name.  I'm just not going to be able to enjoy a novel that casts "the President's political adviser" as a deus ex machina who descends from the rafters of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to punish the bad, non-forward-thinking faction and reward our hero and his bosses.  Declining to name Karl Rove only compounds the sin; it means Sterling knows he's exalting a creep, is ashamed of it, and does it anyway.

The novel isn't all to the bad. The Zenith Angle blends contemporary cultural commentary with genre trappings far more successfully than Sterling managed in his last outing, Zeitgeist.  The more outlandish elements of the plot are assembled so carefully and so gradually that you almost don't notice he's got a villain with a plot worthy of Ernst Stavro Blofeld - or Chairface Chippendale, for that matter - until he's wheeled out the superweapon.  But even after the last curtain is dropped and you realize you've been reading a cheap spy novel that merely postures as a timely cultural critique - well, it's still more entertaining than the metafictional characters leaving Wile E. Coyote holes in walls in Zeitgeist.

Don DeLillo also turns to caricature in Cosmopolis, but more transparently and with more evident satire.  It's unquestionably the better book, although not because of the caricature; overdone satire can be just as bad as the invisible, spineless kind.  But the novel, in which billionaire Eric Packer tries to cross midtown Manhattan during a day-long traffic jam, is structured as a series of distinct episodes, each one as isolated from the scenes before and after it as the footfalls of Odysseus.  Some of these scenes flatly do not work but others are brilliant little biopsies of their cultural moment at the end of the nineties bubble.

I'm partial to the Times Square section, for its portrait of "stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods" and for the anticapitalist protest that occasions the novel's best and most exigent observations.  As in Underworld, DeLillo's radical street theater group is more organized, more effective, and more sinister than radical street theater has ever been, but the scene works because of the contrast between the violence on the streets and the smug running commentary provided by Packer's pet academic from the provisional safety of his stretch limo.  The scene culminates in a passage that John Pistelli argues evokes September 11, even though the novel is set (in bold, sans-serif capitals fit for a Kubrick intertitle) IN THE YEAR 2000.

The contrast with The Zenith Angle and is immediate and telling.  Sterling has avoided a topic (Iraq) that undermines his subject; DeLillo writes around one (September 11) that actually complements his, providing as it did the bitter punctuation to the period whose ending began, he would have us believe, on the day his novel is set.  Writing at the beginning of the end of the bubble, DeLillo proleptically gives us a glimpse of the end of the end, and it ends in fire.

My favorite passage, however, is probably this more humble observation of the diamond district:

Hasidim walked along the street, younger men in dark suits and important fedoras, faces pale and blank, men who only saw each other, he thought, as they disappeared into storefronts or down the subway steps.  He knew the traders and gem cutters were in the back rooms and wondered whether deals were still made in doorways with a handshake and a Yiddish blessing.  In the grain of the street he sensed the Lower East Side of the 1920s and the diamond centers of Europe before the second war, Amsterdam and Antwerp.  He knew some history. [...]  Black men wore signboards and spoke in African murmurs.  Cash for gold and diamonds.  Rings, coins, pearls, wholesale jewelry, antique jewelry.  This was the souk, the shtetl.  Here were the hagglers and talebearers, the scrapmongers, the dealers in stray talk.  The street was an offense to the truth of the future.  But he responded to it.

While the rest of the novel rushes headlong into an uncertain future that purports (falsely, as it will turn out) to have transcended all physical laws, while Eric Packer's cameras show him images of himself before they happen, he's entranced by the diamond district's brazen, retrograde materialism, and I'm entranced along with him.  These diagnostic passages are not only intellectually but emotionally engaging in a way the novel's derisive caricatures are not - and if Cosmopolis does not always attain these heights or linger at them for long, it at least allows for this kind of compartmentalized reaction.

Where DeLillo turns all too frequently to caricature to represent the present, and Sterling to Tom Clancy-style techno-thrillers, William Gibson achieves a surprisingly comfortable naturalism without changing his cyberpunk style in the slightest.  Of the three attempts to write about the present as science fiction, his is the least arch and, not coincidentally, the most successful.

DeLillo and Gibson have been tending towards one another for some time now, a gradual process that became clear to me during a weekend at Rock Island when I read the decade-old Virtual Light.  (Entertaining science fiction, and well-sourced, with more than a nod to Mike Davis.) The first chapter contained this positively DeLilloesque line:

The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way, mostly gray showing through but some old pink Safeway paint left in the little dips and crannies. [...]  He'd overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material's passage through time.  He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.

It's not the passage or even the sentence, just the bit of remembered phrase:  exposing the integrity of the material's passage through time, with that fine DeLilloan ear for the mundane bullshit of our own conversations, sanded down until it almost regains some sort of dignity.

Cosmopolis has lines like that too, and Pattern Recognition probably has fewer of them, but Gibson holds true to this patient observation of the increasing surreality of modern life while DeLillo runs off to write novels about billionaires with shark tanks and wristwatch cameras.  Pattern Recognition doesn't need caricature and generally doesn't force it:  Gibson lets the strangeness express itself.

The novel follows Cayce Pollard, a corporate consultant who's hired to track down the auteur of a mysterious sequence of Web-distributed film footage.  Her assignment takes her through a world of corporate espionage, deep niche marketing, retro-computing technology fetishists (an old Gibson favorite), washed-up cryptography experts, and vanished ex-spies.  The fruits of the new century grow in the ashes of the old, acknowledging the importance (if also the transience) of the past in a way that Eric Packer never could.

The early chapters are discomforting and claustrophobic, focalized all too well through Cayce's jet lag and her strange, double-edged gift, a violent allergic reaction to brands and a knack for apophenia - the ability to perceive, rather than invent, connections between apparently unrelated phenomena.  (The novel's apophenic preoccupations suggest that, rather than tending towards one another, Gibson and DeLillo are each from their own obliques approaching Pynchon.  This prospect makes me happy.)  If the branding allergy is a bit too precious at least it follows its own inscrutable logic and not, say, the authorial fiats of a magical realism that would be at odds with the book's tone.

That tone is the traditional Gibson tone (which has gotten less overtly Chandlerian over the years, but still noirish and elegiac), its plot the traditional Gibson plot, and Cayce Pollard the traditional Gibson protagonist:  when a new acquaintance calls her "Case," we know it's not just an in-joke.  (I need to reread Count Zero but, working from very faded memories, it seems like there are more than superficial similarities between Cayce's assignment and the Marly Krushkova plotline; similarities, for that matter, between the tragic artists who lie behind each of those plots.  That such a comparison could even be possible, given the artists, is itself part of the tragedy.)  The suitability of these old formulas to Gibson's newly realistic fiction does not simply confirm that the present has indeed come to resemble one of his novels.  It tells us that those novels were built not around the trappings of console cowboys and virtual idols but a sturdy core of hard-boiled fiction; and that both the cyberpunk and the noir elements are exceptionally adaptable to novels about our own era, providing what might be the perfect fusion of plot, mood, and social commentary.

At a conference a few months ago I was struck by how many academics were referencing Neuromancer in their work - often superficially, as sometimes happens when one of us decides to stoop down to deal with the demotic, but just as often with real passion and thought.  Gibson is one of those novelists whose work will continue to grow in stature and importance, and Pattern Recognition is a good bid to sustain the process - not because it sheds the cyberpunk elements but because it uses the important ones in new ways to tell an entertaining, perceptive, often moving story.  Moreso than the acknowledged literary giant or his old writing partner, Gibson has produced a novel for our times.

So Respectable

More dispatches from the month, the week, the day, the hour comics broke into the mainstream. The week that began with the New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels ended, for me, with the arrival of the August 2004 Harper's, which reviews three books about superhero comics (Sean Howe's Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, Arlen Schumer's The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, and Alex Ross's Mythology) and, more broadly, superheroes themselves.

Wyatt Mason's "Flying Up and Flying Down: The rise and fall of the American superhero" opens with a summary of the superhero's current cultural vogue, touching on all the blockbuster movies, American Express commercials, and highbrow novels that name-check the Inhumans. To that list we can add the various Times features and now Mason's review itself; I mean that literally, as a little Times and Harper's namedropping will no doubt help sell my still-inchoate Moody/Chabon/Lethem superheroes article to some academic journal. Each successive piece adds more momentum, more institutional weight to the drive to create a serious critical and cultural discussion of comics. That alone speaks well of the McGrath and Howe and Mason pieces, whatever other missteps or faults they might contain.

After establishing the superhero's cultural currency - that is, after implicitly justifying his essay and its subjects to Harper's readers - Mason provides a two-page history of the superhero from the Golden to the Silver Ages. This is the sort of not-quite-insider history that was made to elicit quibbles from those in the know. (My most serious objection is that the 1950s Comics Crusade was not nearly as superhero-centric as Mason leads us to believe; indeed, it may have cleared the path for the Silver Age's superhero renaissance by removing the most successful competing genres.) Others will quibble that Mason shouldn't be writing about superheroes in the first place when Deserving Comic X demands recognition. Both objections are beside the point - there's as much to say about superheroes as there is any other genre, and Mason gets right much more than he gets wrong.

A stronger, more pertinent objection would be that Mason's history stops at the Silver Age, but this seems to be a function of the three works he's chosen for review. Schumer's The Silver Age of Comic Book Art is obviously limited to that period, while most of the essays of Atomsmashers and the entire corpus of Ross's work are backward-looking, nostalgia-obsessed. If the essay engenders any regrets, it's that its subjects are all retrospective; I wish he'd chosen at least one book - perhaps even an actual comic? - that surveys the present or looks to the future instead. This is not an indictment of Mason, but of the nostalgic focus that dominates and limits the pop-criticism he explores.

As to his reviews, Mason is neither fawning nor overly critical of the three books. He offers shrewd judgments of both Ross and the Howe collection - this is apparently the month for writers to heap abuse on Brad Meltzer, much as it is the month for Meltzer to earn that abuse - while giving Schumer's coffee-table art book the most unequivocal praise. None of these assessments are definitive; for example, I much preferred the Schumer review written by my colleague Charles Hatfield in the Spring 2004 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art. Nevertheless, Mason provides some cogent remarks, like this assessment of the illustrations of Alex Ross:

... they are bloated orchestrations, like a symphony playing arrangements of Led Zeppelin: kinda cool, but if you're interested at all, you'd probably prefer the original. Reading a Ross comic, one sees the irresistible, breakneck creativity on view in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art gelded, the emotions roiling there tamed.

For all that Mason's review, like his subjects, spends rather too much time looking backwards, it is another welcome bit of attention.

Astro City: Little Epiphanies

About a year and a half ago, in his introduction to an all-pulp issue of McSweeney's, Michael Chabon threw down a gauntlet before the literary establishment. Confessing his boredom with "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story" - including his own, "sparkling with epiphanic dew" - he called for his fellow writers to look beyond the character-obsessed, kitchen-sink realism that has dominated the short story and return to the joys of plot.

As late as about 1950, if I referred to "short fiction," I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots. A glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales proves the truth of this assertion, but more startling are the names of the authors of these ripping yarns: Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain, Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of modernism, source of the moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out its rivals.

I first read those words the same week I picked up the premier issue of Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City: Local Heroes, the third and most recent incarnation of their acclaimed superhero series. And there it was, in the slice-of-life story about a hotel doorman who (re)introduces us to the heroes of Astro City while disclosing his own heroism: the moment of truth, the pungent revelation that's meant to justify this surprisingly quotidian, all but plotless issue. The swaggering cro-magnon has come to the valley of the superheroes.

This was nothing new for Astro City. From its inception, almost every story has centered on some epiphany or revelation about the lives of its first-person narrators: Samaritan's dream of unencumbered freedom, a young reporter's lesson in journalistic credibility, Astra's desire for a normal childhood. Even the infrequent multi-issue sagas of alien invasions are really more concerned with the pedestrian stuff of a young man's coming to terms with his deceased father. Some of these stories are impeccably executed; others are rife with mawkish cliches. Particularly notable in the latter regard is Astro City: Local Heroes #3, in which a snobbish summer transplant learns that country folk are just plain nicer than city folk. (Strangely, the story ignores the much more traditionally fertile literary ground of exploring why a 29-year-old superhero would be making out with a 17-year-old girl.)

Not every Astro City issue is so overbearing. The Junkman story in vol. 2 #10 succeeds by grounding its simple revelation - the Junkman only wants respect - in the tropes and plots of Silver Age gimmick supervillains; the little moral lesson is perfectly at home with its genre. But regardless of how effectively Busiek integrates the two, Astro City consistently attempts to import the standards of the writer's-workshop short story to superhero comics, overlooking just how narrow those standards have become. As I suggested two days ago, the personal, confessional, and revelatory are far from the only paths to artistic meaning or literary worth. The insistence that each story contain a pithy moral is even more constricting and, frankly, every bit as juvenile as the genre material these issues supposedly transcend.

Superhero comics don't face quite the same dilemma Chabon describes - there's no danger of epiphanic stories crowding out the more conventionally emplotted variety. But quality superhero comics are another matter entirely, and it's a shame that so many writers strive for respectability by jettisoning the things that make superheroes entertaining in the first place. Plot, action, fantasy, and serial continuity have been assets to many genres; superheroes virtually hand them up on a silver platter to any writer enterprising enough to make something of them.

These things aren't easy to do. Indeed, one of the disappointments of Chabon's McSweeney's issue was that so many of the literati tapped to contribute stories couldn't meet the challenge, offering stories that were smirking or simplistic or, worst of all, still plotless - petty epiphanies in genre drag. (Among the exceptions was Rick Moody, whose brilliant "The Albertine Notes" began my appreciation of his work.) Superhero comics are ideally disposed to avoid these pitfalls.

Instead, just at the moment when some of contemporary fiction's most lauded practitioners are declaring their exhaustion with the little-epiphany story, talented comics writers are building whole series around this narrow and glutted mode of storytelling. It's cheaply ironic and even heartbreaking, in a petty sort of way. I bet you could write a short story about it.

With Friends Like These

More dispatches from the year, the month, the week that comics broke into the mainstream. (Again.) This New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels has been getting some good notices from comics fans and scholars, I imagine because it's filled with insightful, accurate, and not at all condescending gems like this:

Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal -- and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.

Other praise turns out to be no less faint:

Shelf loads of manga -- those Japanese comic books that feature slender, wide-eyed teenage girls who seem to have a special fondness for sailor suits. Superheroes, of course, still churned out in installments by the busy factories at Marvel and D.C. Also, newer sci-fi and fantasy series like ''Y: The Last Man,'' about literally the last man on earth (the rest died in a plague), who is now pursued by a band of killer lesbians.

You can ignore all this stuff -- though it's worth noting that manga sells like crazy, especially among women.

...As a comics-literate hipster, you are obligated to note and even approve of this trend. You just don't have to pay attention to any of the actual manga.

Most of the better graphic novelists consciously strive for a simple, pared-down style and avoid tricky angles and perspectives.

A considerable percentage of the new graphic novels are frankly autobiographical. They are about people who are, or who are trying to be, graphic novelists, and they all follow, or implicitly refer to, a kind of ur-narrative, which upon examination proves to be, with small variations, the real-life story of almost everyone who goes into this line of work.

To be fair to the Gray Lady, these statements are only damning to the extent that they're true.

The last excerpt - or rather, its accuracy - disturbs me most. I can't deny that fictional as well as autobiographical works derive much of their power by transmuting life into art. Rule out autobiography entirely and we'd lose reams of Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ellison, Joyce, Nabokov as well as the dismally limited imaginations of so many navelgazing memoirists.

But sometimes it's hard to see any transmutation taking place; sometimes the life appears to dominate the art simply because the artist finds nothing else so fascinating, or has nothing else to say. Perhaps the real problem is laid bare in this clause:

They are about people who are, or who are trying to be, graphic novelists

If self-referentiality and genre ossification are lethal to superhero comics, they are no less so to hipster autobiography or faux autobiography. This is not cause for celebration.

Yesterday I also received the all-comics McSweeney's and Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, the too-cutely-titled collection of essays by writers about comics. You know, "real" writers.

Many of the Atomsmashers pieces are written in the confessional mode, lending the book a guilty, embarrassed, but even more fundamentally odd cast - it sometimes feels like a collection of apologia written not too beneficently on behalf of someone else's medium. The only contributor to work in comics is Brad Meltzer (also Glen David Gold, if you count his strong Escapist story), who contributes a piece on Terra and the Judas Contract that's more self-flagellating than I would have liked.

Sadly, many of these pieces demonstrate the same pernicious autobiographical impulse that characterizes so many of the Times' comics elect. Editor Sean Howe writes, in his introduction,

There have been numerous scholarly essays on the topic - over the years, esteemed intellectuals from George Orwell to Robert Warshow to Leslie Fiedler have waxed philosophical on the comic book - but there's been a dearth of personal writing about this most personal of art forms.

Now, which collection of essays on comics would you rather read - the one with essays by George Orwell and Robert Warshow, or the one where Brad Meltzer explains why he rated Ananda Bresloff a "Yuk" instead of a "Good" in the fifth grade? (Ah, betrayal - "Ananda was so cute.")

More seriously, it's not clear why comics should be the "most personal of art forms," except that you typically start on them when you're young and, Howe seems to think, you should be terribly ashamed of liking them, nor is it clear why more personal writing on them is warranted. When Howe starts gushing about how "comic fans have been tight-lipped about their forbidden love," how his writers have "suppressed musings," how they "wanted to share their long-whispered lingua franca, wanted to come clean about their secret identities," one begins to wonder if he doesn't think copping to a love of comics is as socially transgressive - dare we say, as morally courageous? - as getting thrown in Redding Gaol. Simply put, this book has no exigence if you're not already ashamed of its subject matter.

Happily, the collection also features a number of insightful, analytical, provocative, or just elegantly written essays. I suspect Neilalien will like the Ditko piece, as will anybody who doesn't feel obligated to pretend Objectivism is a serious philosophical position, and Jonathan Lethem (in a revision of this column) contributes a phrase - "inhuman galacticism" - that will forever color my reading of Kirby.

Yet for all that's good in the Times Magazine article and the Howe book, both prescribe the revelatory, the confessional, the autobiographical as comics' primary, if not solitary, path to respectability. What's most frustrating is that this is also the cheapest path to respectability, cheap because it promotes comics (or, in Howe's book, their critics) only to the extent that they do what the prose literary establishment already deems acceptable. That the Times can so pithily sum up the career trajectories of a great many alt-comix artists in one single, insulting narrative (Peanuts to ostracism to "excessive masturbation" to Drawn & Quarterly to the New York Times Magazine) isn't nearly as damning as the fact that the artists' work often says little more.

Finally, a point worth consideration: the Times Magazine article begins with the claim that the novel (read: contemporary literary fiction) may already be declining into niche irrelevancy. Limiting comics to the relentlessly personal, narrowly autobiographical standards of contemporary fiction will result in stories just as narcissistic as much of what's currently produced in that field - the field that, if the Times can be believed, is already in decline.

Next up in my rapidly escalating, Frank Castle-like war against bourgeois respectability and the comics: Michael Chabon, Kurt Busiek, and the little epiphany.

Update (7/14/04): Sean Collins, an early booster of the Times article, responds to my piece with the observation that contemporary alternative comics boast a diversity of genres and subject matter beyond the autobiographical. Sean seems to be under the impression that I think "that 99% of art/altcomix are autobiographical in nature," which isn't the case: I criticized the limited scope of many comix autobiographies, but I didn't claim that they define the entire field. That charge is more properly laid at the feet of Charles McGrath, who seems to think that most sophisticated comics do or should follow an autobiographical narrative. (And even there, he only identifies autobiographical comics as "a considerable percentage," not an entirety.) As Kevin Maroney noted in his comment to this thread, "the author of the Times article is caught up in a rhetoric of autobiography which even his own examples don't support." Save your affronted list of non-autobio comics for him, Sean, not me.

My first and primary criticism of the autobiographists, as McGrath represents them, is one that Sean himself makes, rightly, of many superhero comics. He declares his exhaustion with "comics about other comics about other comics", a charge to which graphic novels about graphic novelists are frequently just as susceptible as monthly series about Iron Fist.

Finally, Sean doubts how many alternative comics I've read (hint: more than I've enjoyed, which is perhaps the real problem here) because I've referred to Dan Clowes as "a non-genre writer." Actually, I said that my impression of his "arid work" was "unremarkable character-based 'nongenre' fiction, distinguished only because its genre, highly respected in literary circles, was at one point fairly uncommon in comics." I also said that another major element of his work, acidic disdain of the superhero genre, wasn't novel or trenchant enough to escape the trap of genre referentiality mentioned above. Of course, these charges couldn't be further from the truth, as most comics scholars and fans now acknowledge that Ghost World, Caricature, Pussey!, and, most recently, The Death Ray were largely ghostwritten by Chuck Austen.

Still, there's one thing Sean and I can agree on - Seth is glam as fuck.

Dinosaur Time

Just when I thought I'd read every word written by contemporary literati about their adolescent love for comic books, this comes out. Thanks to Neilalien for the link, which has prompted a new book order and a scream of unending profanity.

I should probably explain. I've been working on an article about novels and novelists that reference comics, springing from my evolving thoughts on metaphor in comics and in the novels that love them. This week, I finished reading just about every essay, column, or interview I could find that provided the novelists' perspectives on their work (save for a couple of pieces in the new McSweeney's, one or more of which may be reprinted in the Sean Howe book anyway) and was looking forward to beginning the writing. So much for that idea.

Actually, it isn't the appearance of a new book on the subject that bothers me; it's the timetable.

Assuming, rather optimistically, that I have a polished final draft ready by the end of the summer, it would still be a minor miracle if this article sees print before 2006. Even the simplest academic articles move in dinosaur time, their migrations tracked by the slow-settling strata of rejection letters and revision notes and galley proofs. By the time this still strictly hypothetical article appears, who knows how many more books and essays will have made it irrelevant? But this fear is itself irrelevant, since the article will be a highly technical examination of metaphor and psychoanalysis and tropology that'll be appearing in the placid backwaters of academic publishing.

Ahh, that's not all it is; I can't imagine literary publishing moves that much more quickly. This is just that common atmospheric distortion by which the grass on the other side of the fence appears immeasurably greener. Aided and abetted, no doubt, by the fact that one of the contributors to this Sean Howe book is a talented novelist and a high-school acquaintance.

Larger audience, more timely publishing, wider cultural relevance, and now the novelists get to do the freaking comics criticism, too. Ever get the feeling you sat down to the wrong card game?

Ice Storms

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose newest book is called The Fortress of Solitude, has written a couple of interesting essays (well, one interesting one and one silly one) on comics, specifically Marvel comics.

Lethem makes the well-observed point that almost all of the novels about comics - a growing number, especially post-Kavalier and Clay – aim straight for the iconic 1940s/DC characters rather than dealing with the messier, but perhaps more interesting and certainly more emotionally involving Marvel characters.

One exception is Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, which I finally picked up over the holidays (the same day I bought The Starry Wisdom), purely because it makes extensive references to early 70s Fantastic Four comics. Were that the book’s only virtue I would probably feel quite the idiot now, but happily, it turned out to be a great novel for many other reasons - one of those books that I read twice in rapid succession, the first time piecemeal because I knew I'd eventually sift through the whole thing word by word yet I couldn't wait to find out how it ended. (Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, also visible in the Current Reading list over to your right, currently enjoys this status.)

But Moody does get the Fantastic Four exactly right, by providing straightforward and almost irony-free descriptions of the plots of individual issues. They work because Moody dutifully supplies all the continuity necessary to parse the issues, resulting in descriptions that are two, three pages long and exactly nailing what made Bronze Age comics so appealing. Moody understands how their slow accretion of detail somehow adds up to an aggregate emotional intensity larger than any single episode. Yet he also understands the dilemma of time in the frozen universe of Marvel Comics, how sixteen-year-old reader and fan Paul Hood will age and change and his family will fall apart and yet the FF still will be there, fighting and quitting and rejoining and curing Ben Grimm and then uncuring him.

If you're currently salivating over the prospect of an entire novel devoted to the Fantastic Four (even the 70s Fantastic Four), don't get your hopes up - the FF material is only a few pages, and the book's major appeal lies in its fond yet unforgiving depiction of a family's break-up amidst the general cultural collapse of Watergate and The Match Game. But I do enjoy reading a novel, a fine one, that includes sentences like,

He felt certain then that Stan Lee was in some direct communication with the universe - in the same way, say, that the Watcher, that most mysterious Marvel character, was content like some Gnostic entity merely to know of the machinations of creation - and that through Lee's spiritually advanced vision, Paul's own destiny was entrapped in the monthly serializations of these kitschy superheroes. He seemed both influenced and influencer in the world of Marvel.

Okay, so it's not wholly free of irony - that "kitschy" is just too self-aware for a sixteen-year-old True Believer - but it's close enough, and it shows that Moody himself truly knows what the High Marvel House Style was all about.

The actual comic from Moody's novel, in all its pompous Oedipal glory. Well done, Roy Thomas. Well done.

I liked the novel enough that, after I was done (for the second time), I rented Ang Lee's film adaptation. To say "the book was better" would be so obvious... and yet, so accurate.

I should state at the outset that I don't expect movies to replicate perfectly the books they adapt; to do so is impossible, and would usually make the films worse for the effort. But Ang Lee and James Shamus made some poor and unnecessary changes to Moody's novel, replacing a work of acerbic social observations with a few pseudo-profundities.

Regrettably, that includes the Fantastic Four material. Lee and Shamus go straight towards the big, easy cliché, the same one that, incidentally, dominates all the other comic-book novels except “The Ice Storm” - the Comic Characters as Metaphor. The movie has Tobey Maguire mouthing lines like "That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four, that a family is like your own personal antimatter..." Funny, I always thought the meaning of the FF was that in 1961 radiation could give you super powers, not cancer.

No, that's too literal, but that's my point - the FF are a family, the foremost one in comics, but rarely have they ever meant anything about family. They may be a convenient vehicle for talking about family, in the externalized and hyperemotionalized terms of Marvel comics, but they're a vehicle without the fixed tenor that Lee and Shamus apply to them. And that interests me a great deal more than all this antimatter crap. (Perhaps you could justify the line by saying it's the work of Maguire's character - the thoughts of a precocious preppie, projected onto the comic, not some meaning that inheres in the comic - but I'm not sure the movie is that sophisticated. I think we're supposed to buy this as some perceptive, fundamentally true insight.)

If you don't find that sentiment so difficult to swallow, then try this one: they do it again for the Negative Zone, employing it as the objective correlative for some kind of topsy-turvy emotional state. (I just described it about as well as they did, I'm sorry to say.)

I'm not sure if even Stan Lee at his most grandiose ever presented the Negative Zone as anything other than The Place Where Everything Blows Up A Lot. A backdrop for many plots charged with emotional energy, true (not the least of which was the great "This Man, This Monster"), but not a metaphor for anything.

These lines are so frustrating because they neatly undo what Moody does so well. Lee and Shamus take the comics out of their own terms and shape them into nothing more than metaphors – and rather forced ones at that. I still get that Maguire's character likes the FF an awful lot, but I no longer see why because I no longer see them as Paul Hood would have seen them, as I would have seen the Teen Titans or the X-Men a few years later. Instead the comics are didactic little parables, all too easily transferable to the world of the Hood family, and utterly charmless.

I'm tempted to say the disappointments of The Hulk make a little more sense to me now. That movie was, in some ways, ruined by its own metaphors as well - by Lee's determination to make Daddy Banner literally as well as psychologically responsible for Young Banner's suppressed rage and his transformation into the Hulk. But the Hulk is at his best, and the movie is at its best, when he expresses that rage within the terms of the comic-book world and not the pop psychology - that is, when he's bounding through the desert, free and angry and kicking the crap out of the military-industrial complex that's been trying to imprison and exploit him. Now that's a metaphor.

Group Sex with Ugly People

Now there's a title that should generate an interesting set of referrals...

Sorry, fetishists, this post is about one of the least erotic books ever written, a collection of Lovecraft tributes called The Starry Wisdom and published by Creation Books.

I picked it up for free on a Christmas-gift trade-in - given the choice between the gibbering madness of the Great Old Ones and Phil Jackson's autobiography, I'll take Shub-Niggurath any day, thank you - because it features the work of some of my favorite authors and because I've been interested in Lovecraft ever since Doug got me hooked via the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game back in high school. (By the way, I'm the reason he's called Dead Allen, thank you very much.) The anthology is well worth reading for the contributions by comics superstars Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, as well as some fine if old and oft-reprinted tales by Brian Lumley, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and others. And therein lies the problem.

Because the rest of the book is a brimming bucket of swill, a collection of aggressively artless nonstories by people who write in all-caps and sign their work "Rotting Pig." People who think prose-poem transcriptions of "sex-ritual invocations" are as fascinating to us as to them. People who spell "magic" with a "k."

Reading this book - no, touching this book, the simple act of contemplating the purchase of this book - is like being invited to have group sex with ugly people. Sure, there may be one or two attractive folks present, but you'll have to wade through all the twig-bearded Ren-festers to get to them, and frankly even the pretty ones are a little suspect if they're running with this crowd.

Look, I realize that we are dealing with H.P. Lovecraft here, that by definition any tribute anthology is going to be produced by and for a certain morbid and donnish slice of fandom, but these guys surely are the furries of the Lovecraft set. They take this stuff entirely too seriously, not as art but as a cosmology. With Fritz Leiber or Robert Bloch or even poor, talentless Clark Ashton Smith you don't get the sense that they believed in this shit and they certainly wouldn't have liked it if they did.

And this brings me to the sleaziest part of Creation Books' unwelcome come-on, its insinuation that the Great Old Ones somehow represent forces of sexual and psychological liberation. That if you resist the raising of sunken Ry'leh then you're just a hopeless square, a conformist, a patriarch, or a foolish rationalist in the face of the absolute void of reason. (A lot of great stories have been written on this last theme. "Extracted from the Mouth of Rotting Pig" is not one of them.)

These ideas wouldn't be a bad basis for a psychological criticism of the Lovecraft canon, and in fact the authors of some of the anthology's worst fiction contribute a couple of interesting essays to this effect at the back of the book. But such pretensions fall apart in the stories, where the authors have to act as if (and many of them seem to genuinely believe) Lovecraft's creations are real. Is there truly anything liberating about the mass death, horror, and rape that figure so prominently in so many of these stories? (It's particularly galling to see the authors and editors of these rape fantasies crowing about how antipatriarchal their little book is.) Are they really preferable to the "patriarchal vision of order, logic, and reason" at which so many of the lesser contributors go out of their way to sneer?

Much of the book's revolutionary posturing appears to be based on, I would submit, a fundamental misapprehension of Lovecraft's work. The Mythos stories derive their power from Lovecraft's terror at the loss of reason and patriarchal order, but do not offer any viable or particularly attractive alternatives to them. They cannot, if they're going to be truly horrific.

There was the blueprint of an intriguing book somewhere in The Starry Wisdom. There must be room for some more sensible reading of Lovecraft that acknowledges or even reverses his obvious horror at the feminine, the nonwhite, the Other (what is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" if not a paranoid fear of miscegenation?) without also uncritically accepting his entirely negative metaphors for them. If you really wanted to mount a "progressive" reaction to Lovecraft - and I'm not sure that such a project would be worthwhile, as it might completely undermine the ethos of the whole Lovecraft mythos - wouldn't you be better served by changing the terms of those metaphors?

Some contributors try, and some even succeed (Morrison's "Lovecraft in Heaven"). Others, like Alan Moore, accept Lovecraft's universe at its most grotesque but don't try to prettify it with a couple of first-semester grad-school arguments. The anthology is worth reading.

If you don't mind buying half a book.