Published August 31, 2009 | 
Warning: Spoilers for Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.
I should probably not read Matt Ruff while on vacation. I found Bad Monkeys extremely disturbing. The main character has a violent background and some things to feel seriously guilty about. She leads a purposeless, drug-ridden life until recruited for a secret organization that fights evil. From then on the book is a hall of mirrors, and the apparent meaning of all the events is constantly shifting.
One reason the spygame plot (evil Troop versus fighting-evil Organization) bothered me is that good and evil don’t work that way. It’s not a question of which side you join. Some of the greatest evils of the past century were done by people who thought they were on the side of virtue, fighting evil.
What matters is what you do. How you do it. And although Ruff explicitly makes the point that otherwise good people can do evil, he doesn’t allow moral complexity its full scope.
James Ellroy‘s Black Dahlia is a compelling mess of a book. I never got the sense that the author was in control of his material — in fact, it was a runaway train. It also has some weird commonalities with Bad Monkeys. In each, a main character is carrying a huge burden of guilt for the disappearance of a sibling. Both books are meditations on good and evil. Also, they both have so many false endings that you can’t keep track of them.
Published June 26, 2009 | Yes, that’s actually what they call the small screening room (in a simulated bomb shelter) at the Atomic Testing Museum in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. (Just blocks from the Strip on one side and the Clark County Library on the other. The library has a vast ongoing book sale that makes it one of the best used bookstores in Las Vegas.)
The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, is dedicated to the history of testing nuclear devices, from the days of the Manhattan Project up to the present. I thought the science was explained pretty well (Alan, the physicist, says it was adequate for lay people). I certainly will never forget the excerpt of Disney’s Our Friend the Atom film. The excerpt skipped old Walt himself, but included a German scientist, hundreds of mousetraps armed with ping-pong balls, Atomic Energy as a Tom of Finland-style genie whom we can finally control, and a non-turning globe firmly focused on the Western hemisphere. Radioactivity was portrayed as a jitterbugging atom-headed creature in tie and tails, animated in every sense, leaping from one element to another. And there are rows of Geiger counters, inactive bomb cases, and vast drillheads to delight the techies.
The museum provides plenty of social context — the Einstein letter, some newsreels, and a lot of snippets from television. The earlier ones I found utterly fascinating, because by God that was the world I was born into. There is a 1940s/1950s era office complete with–”Look, Alan, a *real* telephone!” And a non-electric typewriter, and various other objects that have faded into prehistory. The display of pop-culture atomic allusions was mostly amusing, but the cover of the old Life or Look magazine on the children of the atomic scientists was utterly chilling. Headline trumpeting that these kids have been through a score of nuclear tests. Mushroom cloud rising in the background; in the foreground, a dozen kids prone in their unnaturally clean play clothes. It didn’t look like a test. It looked like a tidy massacre.
Nuclear testing is more than blowing up Bikini Atoll or the kind of underground nuclear testing that seems so routine today. They tested the relative effectiveness of aerial versus surface detonation. They tested the effects of radioactivity on various house materials. The museum even features a facsimile bomb shelter that was used in testing shelters, complete with its blond, blue-eyed mannequins: brave Dad on his feet looking about him in curiosity, seated Mom in a dark-blue wrap dress with her face turned toward Junior in his overalls. They didn’t show that in fifteen years or so Junior would be a long-haired antiwar protester, Dad would be an alcoholic, and Mom would be coming out as a lesbian textile artist (after her time in the psychiatric hospital).
In addition to the testing itself, the museum gave a nod to the test sites: geology, history, and meaning to the indigenous peoples who found the arid land a sacred place of plenty. Looking at the tools they shaped, I had to ponder that they used the land with more love and more productivity than we did, and left it living for the next generation. Well, until we started exploding thermonuclear devices over, under, and on it. On the other hand, the Nevada Test Site is still used as a training ground for first responders from all over the US to learn to deal with radiation emergencies and hazardous waste.
We checked out the museum shop, looking for Ellen Klages’ superb books on the kids at Los Alamos: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace. No dice. So I stopped at the cash register to mention them. Although the cashier seemed indifferent, the bookstore manager overheard and came out to get details. She’d been looking for books that would help kids understand it all. With the help of the iPhone, Alan was even able to provide the ISBN numbers.
Then out again into the 109-degree heat and heavy traffic of Flamingo Road. On the next block we saw two women — one in a bikini — trying to cross against the light. Nobody stopped for them. Nobody even paused to look.
Published April 22, 2009 | Poetry Month is ending soon, but (in addition to today’s poem), I’ll leave you with recommendations for two fine novels about poets, both by John Crowley.
Christa (Kit) Malone, college student and aspiring poet, studies with and helps to translate the work of Innokenti Isayevitch Falin, a distinguished Russian poet in exile. It’s 1962, and the Cold War is at its height. As teacher and student learn from each other, the political tensions grow toward the Cuban missile crisis.
OK, there is no way to summarize this novel. It is as tough and delicate as porcelain, shapely as a peach. Kit is both flawed and talented, and she matures as she copes with loss, grief, guilt, learning, betrayal, and love. Falin speaks with the unmistakable accents of the Slav living in translation, and from a wholly believable history.
The author writes with a feather-light, effective touch of the issues that were about to blow the country apart. He explores the problems of language — context, translation, even finding the way to speak — while subtly revealing tragedies and great joy. The story accumulates feeling as it goes along, and its narrative tensions grow more and more taut.
Occasionally one encounters a perfect poem. Much less often does one find a perfect work of fiction, whose form, phrasing, and content could not be improved.* This, to my mind, is one of the few.
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley
Lord Byron never wrote a novel. If he had, he would have written the story at the center of this one: a tale of passion, hereditary curses, courageous women, star-crossed men.
Around his manuscript are other stories: about the modern researchers seeking to decode it; about Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter; about a Byronic film director.
Crowley never makes the common mistake of confusing Byron the man with the characters in his poetry. His Lordship’s manners were urbane, Augustan, generous, idealistic, and warm, and all that is shown in the Byron manuscript. Having extensively researched Byron, I was able to spot dozens of charming allusions to his life and work. And the voice is Byron’s own, the same voice in his letters, journals, and collected conversations. It’s an extraordinary performance.
Byron himself is so vivid none of the other characters can quite live up to him, but the book is well worth reading anyway. I came away from it feeling glad that someone could speak in Byron’s human, humane voice. Those qualities matter.
*Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is one such book. Rachel McKenzie’s The Wine of Astonishment is another. Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon.