2666's The Part About the Crimes and Literary Realism

I haven't posted much about it recently, but I just last week completed Roberto Bolano's 2666, participating in the group read hosted by bolanobolano.com. I've avoided writing much about the book since January mostly because, after reading the superb recaps and analyses on that site, I felt like I didn't have much to add. Additionally, to be honest, I found the group read scheduling a little disorienting. It's been a little while since my college days concluded and I really haven't read on someone else's schedule since then. I don't know if I could have successfully completed 2666 (and I'm not sure that I even would have embarked upon this journey) without the support and scheduling of the group, but the read felt choppy at times. If I finished a section on a Wednesday, I would usually wait until Monday to begin the next week's portion. This type of scheduling may be better suited for a repeat reading. Something to think about.

But, now that I've completed the book, I'd like to think for a moment on the effect it had on me, the reader. I'm thinking specifically of The Part About the Crimes, the most famous, longest section, clocking in at nearly 300 pages. This part is a weaving narrative of many minor and major characters, but one of the recurring themes is a spate of crimes committed in the Mexican town of Santa Teresa throughout the mid-'90s. The crimes in question are very specific: young women are being raped and murdered. Around 200 of them. And they're described in graphic detail. Here's a representative paragraph:

In the middle of November, Andrea Pasheco Martinez, thirteen, was kidnapped on her way out of Vocational School 16. Although the street was far from deserted, there were no witnesses, except for two if Andrea's classmates who saw her head toward a black car, probably a Peregrino or a Spirit, where a person in sunglasses was waiting for her. There may have been other people in the car, but Andrea's classmates didn't get a look at them, partly because the car windows were tinted. That afternoon Andrea didn't come home and her parents filed a police report a few hours later, after they had called some of her friends. The city police and the judicial police took charge of the case. When she was found, two days later, her body showed unmistakable signs of strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. She had been anally and vaginally raped. There was tumefaction of the wrists, as if they had been bound. Both ankles presented lacerations, by which it was deduced that her feet had also been tied.

First, notice the writing style here. It bears the unmistakable mark of a police report, with the straightforward summary of violence. But more important than the content of this one paragraph is the cumulative effect of reading dozens of such reports. Even though other sections of the novel describe more quantitative deaths, the quality of the descriptions isn't nearly as graphic. The horrific murders of The Part About Archimboldi doesn't register in the same way as the murders of the women in Santa Teresa.

This is a tough, tough section to read. And it's intentionally written this way. James Wood speaks often about the necessary balance of realism and readability in fiction. The Part About the Crimes strained the limits of what I could read. But to achieve the realism needed for this section, Bolano had to push some boundaries here. Because, after all, he's describing the brutal real-life murders of Ciudad Juarez. This is supposed to hurt. It's the only way the author can get across the numbing repetition of these violent crimes. And, you know what, this section wouldn't have had the same effect if this was written any other way.

Helplessness of the Self: James Wood on David Foster Wallace

It was my true pleasure to spend a portion of this evening listening to James Wood talk about David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, part of The Critic's Voice series at the 92Y. The idea behind this series is to have Wood read a book for the first time before sharing his thoughts with an audience. It's important to keep this basic format in mind, because Wood was very much not presenting a unified reading of Brief Interviews. That wasn't his goal. Instead, it seems that he wanted to think aloud about the book, throwing out his initial reactions as a reader.

This was a wholly worthwhile experience mostly because Wood is an incredibly astute reader. This should come as no surprise to people familiar with his writing, but part of the joy of the talk was to hear how a great reader approaches some really good fiction. And Wood, in fact, started off the talk by reading several passages of exceptional writing, including such gems as "Whereas but your basic smoothie" (p. 31) and "Trim and good and good legs--she'd had a kid but wasn't all blown out and veiny and sagged" (p. 27). Wood referred to these examples of speech--repellent and  horrible as they are--as the local pleasures of the book, noting that there is a good American tradition of capturing speech and consciousness.

From there, Wood proceeded to address what he identified as the major theme of the collection: the helplessness of the self, and the trouble of escaping from the self. This is a well-trod trope to those familiar with Wallace's body of work, and Wood did a nice job of demonstrating how this happens throughout a selection of the stories, performing, in one particularly nice segment, a fairly close read of "The Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)," in which the narrator has a recurring nightmare of being blind. Wood called this a typical Wallace modulation; even this 1.5 page story which may at first glance appear to be a straightforward account of a person putting his feet in someone else's shoes becomes overwhelmingly solipsistic. The narrator doesn't devote any thought to how blind people cope with reality. Instead, the story occurs in his head, a solipsistic recounting of the hardships of the day after the night in which he dreamed that he was blind. It's a story that looks like it's all about empathy, but which, in the end, describes the self-centered experience of one person. The same is true, Wood claimed, of "The Depressed Person." Wood read an extended excerpt beginning with the last sentence of p. 67 through most of p. 68. For me, one of the key phrases which demonstrates the essential solipsism of the depressed person occurs at the very end of p. 67: "and here the depressed person waited patiently for an episode of retching in the especially available trusted friend to pass so that she could take the risk of sharing this with her." Remember that this particular trusted friend had been diagnosed with cancer. I especially love the emphasis on taking the risk of sharing. The depressed person truly cannot escape from her own self.

The last major topic Wood covered was the amount of information granted to--or withheld from--the reader. In certain cases, Wood argued, Wallace withholds exactly the information that the reader is most interested in knowing. "Adult World," "Think," and"Signifying Nothing" all hinge on repressing the flow of information to the reader. Wood's main critique, in fact, is that Wallace repeatedly reveals too much, playing his hand too heavily. In Brief Interview #46--the one which mentions Victor Frankl, beginning on p. 116--the hideous man displays an intimacy with the aftereffects of rape that could only come, Wood claimed, from a victim; in Wood's opinion, Wallace should have left it to the reader to figure that out without the explicit explanation at the end of that interview. Maybe the most interesting analysis of the evening came on this exact point regarding Brief Interview #20 (the very last interview in the book). Here too, Wood believes that the hideous man too openly identifies himself with the rapist of the story, most damningly at the very end of that section, when he says: "can you see why there's no way I could let her just go away after this?" (I'll admit that I hadn't thought that this line, along with certain other details--mostly surrounding the vividness of the hideous man's description of the scene occurring on the gravel--implicated the hideous man as the rapist himself, but I am now eager to reread that story.)

From there, Wood took several questions from the audience. I won't touch on all of them, but I do want to mention one question in particular, because it's tied up with Wood's reading of Brief Interview #20. One gentleman asked whether Wood thinks Wallace relies too heavily on "tricks," in particular the footnotes and the brackets, and whether this detracts attention from the empathy and emotional depth of the fiction. Wood responded that in certain ways, it feels like Wallace is performing, and that he would prefer to have seen Wallace perform less. On the other hand, Wood argued, Wallace can often be too much of a realist. This is a point Wood made in How Fiction Works, but, he said, even though Wallace has very good reasons--most of which have to do with recreating the experiences described in the story--to extend "The Depressed Person" past 30 pages, it can sometimes become unreadable. (While I thought "The Depressed Person" was readable, I couldn't help but think of the infamous "Wardine" section of Infinite Jest.) One of the nice things about literary conventions is that we recognize that the whole story can't be told and that sometimes it's worth forgoing some realism for a more concise and concentrated reading experience. (I find this point really fascinating in light of this article comparing Infinite Jest and Wikipedia. Is there really a need for limits?) And, on the third hand, Wood said that he wasn't so thrilled by the prospect of more empathy because it sometimes devolved into sentimentality. Zadie Smith is so concerned with upholding the emotional depth of these stories--as outlined in Changing My Mind--that she, Wood said, fails to appreciate the complexity of the collection. Brief Interview #20 is not a straightforward story of a formerly hideous man learning a valuable lesson from the woman on the blanket. Even if you don't go so far as to identify the hideous man as the rapist, Wood said that it's crucial to recognize that the story, as we saw earlier, is complex.

There were a few additional questions asked--several of them were really good--but it's getting late and my notes aren't as solid on those points. This summary is based on the quick notes I was able to take during the proceedings, so if anyone wants to fill in missing details or to correct mistaken information, please shoot me an email or leave them in the comments.

Passion Shines Through

I love it when people are passionate about the things they do. I'm always reminded of this during March Madness season--the players are passionate, the group of strangers with whom I watched some of the opening round games were passionate, and, of course, Gus Johnson is passionate:



But he's not the only one who gets worked up over sports. Witness ESPN's Tim Kurkjian talking about a 2007 baseball game in which the Texas Rangers scored 30 runs:


On The Phone: Tim Kurkjian

And this is also why I think James Wood (The New Yorker book critic, and the Harvard professor) is a national treasure: the passion he has for fiction comes screaming through the pages. Take this example from his book How Fiction Works, in which he discusses a passage of Henry James's novel, What Masie Knew:

This is tremendously subtle. It is so flexible, so capable of inhabiting different levels of comprehension and irony, so full of poignant identification with young Masie, yet constantly moving in toward Masie and moving away from her, back toward the author. 

This sample is only moderately selected. I opened up to a random page and found that waiting for me. Wood's writing is just full of this type of intelligent yet loving analysis.

I'm going tonight to hear Wood speak about DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Some have pointed out that we shouldn't expect to hear a fawning, only positive review of the short story collection. But I think that's part of the appeal. I wouldn't expect Wood to provide anything other than his honest opinion of his reactions to the book.

More thoughts will follow after the event.

DFW and the Village Chorus

I just finished James Wood's excellent How Fiction Works. This is a longish quote, but it's excellent. Wood has just described how authors utilize what he calls free indirect style, whereby the character being described affects the perspective, diction, and style of even a third-person narrator. He continues with the following short chapter on DFW and his use of this technique:

A contemporary writer like David Foster Wallace wants to push this tension to the limit. He writes from his characters' voices and simultaneously over them, obliterating them in order to explore larger, if more abstract, questions of language. In this passage from his story "The Suffering Channel," he evokes the ruined argot of Manhattan media-speak:

The other Style piece the associate editor had referred to concerned The Suffering Channel, a wide grid cable venture that Atwater had gotten Laurel Manderley to do an end run and pitch directly to the editor's head intern for WHAT IN THE WORLD. Atwater was one of three full time salarymen tasked to the WITW feature, which received .75 editorial pages per week, and was the closest any of the BSG weeklies got to freakshow or tabloid, and was a bone of contention at the very highest levels of Style. The staff size and large font space meant that Skip Atwater was officially contracted for one 400 word piece every three weeks, except the juniormost of the WITW salarymen had been on half time ever since Eckleschafft-Böd had forced Mrs. Anger to cut the editorial budget for everything except celebrity news, so in reality it was more like three finished pieces every weeks.

Here is another example of what I called "unidentified free indirect style." As in the Chekhov story, the language hovers around the viewpoint of the character (the journalist Atwater), but really emanates from a kind of "village chorus"--it is an amalgam of the kind of language we might expect this particular community to speak if they were telling the story.

And later: "In Wallace's case, the language of his unidentified narration is fairly ugly, and a bit painful for more than a page or two." Even later-er: "Wallace pushes to parodic extremes his full-immersion method: he does not flinch at narrating twenty or thirty pages in the style quoted above."

Anyone who's slogged through the Wardine section of Infinite Jest is here nodding in agreement.