Shhh! I'm Reading.

I’m a big fat J.G. Ballard fan. To pilfer a Rob Gordon expression, Crash is in my all time top 5. If you don’t like that book, I don’t know, I’m not sure we can be friends. We read Empire of the Sun last month at my book club. I was like, yay!, we’re reading Ballard! People are gonna love this shit! Nope. We score books on a 10 point scale for kicks. Ballard had to work hard for a 6.4 (we are very precise, our club coordinator has a background in finance). Wee Jim was viewed as lacking in humanity, a cold lifeless little wench who didn’t give two pops about his long lost family and seemed content to diddle about on his bicycle, ogling ladies outside his demographic. The punches to the face of the pilot amidst the throes of death were a problem for folks too. As the great George R.R. Martin once said, “pfui!” Ballard’s novel is, in my estimation (and what else matters really?), a brilliant study of the collision of humanity and technology. I think, in many ways, that has been Ballard’s preoccupation throughout much of his work; perhaps most obviously in Crash. It’s a sustained meditation on the borderlands between the human body and machine. And World War 2, if you’re a novelist interested in the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, is the definitive event. That Ballard had a personal connection to the material seems beside the point.  Anyway, this is the great thing about participating in a book club: fiery dissent, irreconcilable differences, intellectual smackdowns. I still love Ballard. Deal with it.

The great thing about book clubs is that people are likely to disagree on the variable merits of a book. That’s why I joined one. I knew though that there would come a month when the author on deck was a) a writer that I cherished and b) said cherished writer would be subject to a communal smackdown. Witness the vitriolic reaction to Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed at our last get together. Now, I have to mention that I fully appreciate that Ferris’s prickly cactus vibe is not for everybody. I went to see him read at the IFOA last year and a woman got up and left in a huff in the middle of the event grumbling “what an asshole” under her breath. So, while the relative charm of an author likely has little to no bearing on the likeability factor of his/her characters, it did not surprise me when a fellow clubber proclaimed “why don’t they just die already?” Now that I think of it, I’m assuming she was talking about the characters but then again…

But you see, that’s the thing. I love a curmudgeon. My list of all time favorite authors includes David Rakoff, Will Self, Richard Price…are you getting a picture? Add Ferris to that list. Salty, wry, witty, unforgiving and unrelenting. That’s how I like my characters…and my authors. I don’t feel the need to emapthize with the characters in a novel. In fact, I find the reading experience is usually better if I don’t. Patrick Bateman as a nice guy, a kind of Bud Fox gone wrong? I don’t think so. 

Maybe it’s because the central character of the novel, Tim, suffers from a physical affliction - he walks compulsively, it’s ruining his life - that people read this book expecting it to pluck their heartstrings. Some thought that the conceit of an unnamed affliction as a metaphor for whatever ails us all as human beings (one way of reading the book for sure) was heavy handed and twee. I’m more sympathetic to that argument. Beware the metaphor monster right? The Times waged that the inconsistency between a plight writ “lightweight [and] fanciful” and the “biblical degree of suffering” the family endures makes it impossible to empathize with the characters. Again with the empathy thing. They aren’t our friends. We’re not having them over for dinner on Friday. Why do we need to see ourselves in them?

At least one other member of the group felt that the novel was as powerful and tender as I found it; blessedly saving me from the pitchfork wielding Ferris haters on the other side of the table. We also agreed that it captured the darker sides of modern materialism in fresh and meaningful ways. I think this is something Ferris excels at. His previous novel, Then We Came to the End, applies a similarly witty - often times downright gut busting funny - hand in an examination of the search for the seat of the soul in corporate America. The Unnamed turns instead to the domestic sphere and asks the question “what happens when the strangeness that we erected picket fences to keep out, turns out, instead, to come from within?” It is no coincidence that the married couple at the center of the novel were given the names Tim and Jane. I don’t tend toward love stories, and in many ways this is a love story, but Ferris gets away with it; bouoyed along by these lovely suburban Lynchian inflections.  

Next month we tackle Alissa York’s Fauna which I suspect folks will - ahem - fawn over. Also (bonus!) Alissa York is joining us for the meeting which is mighty gracious of her.

(illustration by Sabine7 via MOCO)