Category: Review

I was inordinately pleased when I heard this week that Zadie Smith reported that the most “impassioned” book recommendation David Foster Wallace ever gave her was for Brian Moore’s little novella, Catholics.

I know Brian Moore was friends with Joan Didion and he won lots of prizes but I always feel like he is the most neglected of all of Ireland’s great literary talents. There is no Irish author more eminently readable than Moore and his treatment of Irish religion, even living in exile in Canada and California, was unparalleled.

Apart from Aidan Mathews of course. If Moore is neglected, Mathews seems forgotten. Yet his short story collection from 1988, Adventures In A Bathyscope blew my mind as a young teenager. Re-reading it as an adult was the rarest of pleasures- I got to think fondly of my adolescent self for being so exhilarated by such fine art. Lipstick On The Host is his second collection of short stories. It is magnificent. The title story comes last and tells of an English teacher, aged 41, alone with nothing but the considerable compensation of her wonderful integrity and wit.

And then most unexpectedly, she falls in love. It is touching and tragic and lovely and heavy. It alone is worth the price of the second hand book procured through some digital mastery via a warehouse in Texas. Yet it is joined by tales where Mathews inhabits the lives of housewives, little boys and 1st Century camels.

And in his depiction of characters who have faith he excels far beyond Moore and basically is the finest writer of fiction who ends up penning theology I have yet encountered. I rate it higher than Dostoevsky. I would though, cos Fyodor is from 1890’s Russia whereas Matthews was writing about the Ireland I grew up in. Where Moore describes faith in such a way that it actually is realistic and believable, it remains the description of a church from the outside. He discerns much from the glow through the stained glass windows. Matthews knows what the faith feels like from the inside. He thus never falls into telling you that religion is a lifestyle choice that motivates the peculiar actions of a character. It is much deeper than that. Much realer than that. Much more alive than that.

I had a great session with the fifth years and Milton. We talked about the paradox of him being a Puritan who adored the city of Rome; we talked about the paradox of a Christian scripting mighty fine speeches for Satan, and then we talked for a time about The Exorcist, because they wanted to. Mind you, I always thought The Exorcist was an over-eighteen. They all agreed the best scene was where the head turns round and she vomits everywhere. That was when I tried to get them back to Milton and how his use of lovely, long Latin words is a compensation for no sex. It is, actually, a kind of cunnilingus.

Should I have said that? Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. You can show them pictures of the electric chair or a baby eating blue-bottles in a back-street in Bangladesh, but you can’t tell them that people receive each other like Holy Communion.

– Aidan Mathews, “Lipstick on the Host” in Lipstick on the Host, p. 248-249.

I loved this book.

Your Correspondent, He’s as bright as his hair is dark

This is a long, uneven but ultimately worthwhile novel. It is Franzen’s second work and as thematically all over the map as 27th City, Corrections and Freedom. It deals with induced seismicity, the influence of evangelical Christianity on American politics, the nature of environmental discourse, the moral conundrum that is abortion, the curse that inheritance can be and many other issues besides. It also is notable for once again being like his first novel, a book that features major protagonists who are not very likeable. But what is going to linger for me is probably the very realistic depiction of a charismatic young anti-abortion campaigner:

He nodded. “Persecution, sure, that’s your line on it. But not deportation and murder. See, I think what’s bothering you about these videos is they’re so effective. They affect you. But there’s even more effective ads on TV for buying jeans or buying beer. Ads that use sex, which is the most powerful and dishonest thing of all. You know, like if I drink Bud Light I’ll get my own hot little beach girl to mess around with. You talk about dishonest and manipulative and harmful. And if you’re up against a pernicious thing like that, you need some powerful images yourself. And the fact is, there is something beautiful about a mother and her baby, and there is something ugly about abortions. All I want’s an equal shot at the market. And the thing is I can’t get one.”

– Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion, p. 326.

Your Correspondent, Religions can’t have shots at the market without being subject to hostile takeovers

I realised while reading this very enjoyable and interesting little novel why I still have a problem with sci-fi or as they like to call it to make it more respectable, “speculative fiction”. It can be very well written, it is almost always diverting in its initial premise. Both of these things apply to Roberts’ New Model Army that fascinatingly posits the rise of mercenary militias in the not-too-distant future. They are deeply connected by computer networks and this disposes of the hierarchies that have ordered armies for millennia. These “new model armies” raise havoc where they emerge and Roberts produces excellent thought-provoking scenarios about the very radical idea that is pure democracy.

It also manages to do this without what I call “Zeeing“, which is when a novelist ruins the narrative with technical descriptions of the imagined worlds he had built.

The niggling problem I still have however is how the sci-fi novelist slips so easily into something that isn’t quite lecturing but certainly is a self-indulgent digression from the story that the author worked so hard to get me interested about. In sci-fi novels, passages like this are tolerated almost without notice:

This is Homo sapiens, on the small scale, from the earliest times: eating and sleeping; fucking and fighting. Under ‘eating’ we can bracket all the activities associated with fetching food, all the hunting and the gathering. Under ‘sleeping’ we can bracket all forms of resting, lounging in the sun, starting at the trees, or the walls of our cave. Otherwise what we do, as monkeys, or hominids, or Neanderthals, or early man, in the savannahs or forests, is fuck and fight. Two things that have more in common than just alliteration. The big change is not fire, or the wheel, or language. The big change is play. Play grows into something new. Because, of course, most animals play a little, from time to time. But what makes human beings human is the way we filter everything we do through play. Fucking, inflected via play, parses not only into more elaborate and all-year-round fucking and role-play fucking and all that: it parses into dancing, and music; into art and culture and science. Fighting inflected via play parses into sport, and into politics, and religion. And soon enough we reach a time when it is impossible to simply fuck, or fight – impossible, even, simply to eat or sleep. Play, in its spiralling recherché, rococo forms, shapes everything we do. We are always playing; whether we are talking about work or leisure, about being alone or being with others, we are addicted to play,play is our complete horizon. What have I been doing, if not playing at soldiers? Playing at killing and breaking? Why else would I have enjoyed it so much, if there had been no play involved? The mistake we make, I suppose, is in thinking that playful is in some sense opposed to serious. Play owns seriousness, wholly.

There’s nothing more serious than play.

– Adam Roberts, New Model Army, p. 263-264.

If that was true, discipline in how you tell stories would be a very important measure by which to assess the success of novels.

Your Correspondent, Always wanted to see a mailbox shoot a boy

How can you not love a book that is sub-titled: “How the church is to behave if freedom, justice and a Christian nation are bad ideas”?!

The crucial question is how we can make the story we believe to be true not only compelling for us but for the whole world – a world caught between such unhappy alternate stories. In short, the challenge is how, as Christians, we can find a way to witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus without that witness becoming an ideology for the powers that would subvert that witness. I think we can do that if we take seriously the very character required of us by the story that we believe to be the truth about our existence – that is, that we be witnesses.

– Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom?, p. 148.

This is a book that takes this question very seriously. But Hauerwas is not about to instrumentalise the church so that we can increase our growth and maximise our religious market-share by pretending to care about avoiding ideology. This book will be deeply frustrating if you only read books to get answers.

I suppose that isn’t true, really. The answer this book gives is that there are vastly more complicated and more primary problems with wanting to share the story we believe to be true in a compelling fashion than simply “how to achieve that end”. The six essays are premised on the idea that the church is today in an “awkwardly intermediate stage of having once been culturally established but not yet clearly disestablished.” Taking on what it means to be free, what it means to be just, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to learn a craft, what it means to be sexual and what it means to be educated, Hauerwas is always pushing us back to the question “Is it true?”

Your Correspondent, Got more sneakers than a plumber’s got pliers

Clarence addressed his ball and drew his driver back over his head with a studied creakiness. Everything by the book, RC though. Clarence was like that. When he was fully wound up, he uncoiled all at once. His club whistled. He clobbered the ball and then nodded, accepting the shot like a personal compliment.

Which is how I hope Jonathan Franzen accepts paragraphs of vivid description like this when they come out of his typewriter. A sprawling, impressive novel with details in the plot so unusual and so seemingly out of kilter with the times we live in that you can’t help but like it. Can a novel this massive and dense be described as quaint?

Your Correspondent, This I know, his teeth as white as snow

Michael Lewis is one of the most stylish journalists around. My copy of the Big Short, procured from the local town library is one of the least stylish covers I’ve ever seen.

On the morning that Bear Stearns collapsed, Steve Eisman was delivering a speech at an event due to be attended by no less than Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed. Eisman was an investment banker who had for a number of years cultivated a portfolio based on the premise that the mortgage boom was built on fraud and would collapse. As his prophecies were literally coming true, this is what he wanted to say, but ultimately didn’t have the guts to say:

The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.’ And no one ever gave a shit about what I had to say.

It is a compelling rant that summarises the shocking fraud, injustice and incompetence that has led us (with many other factors at play) to a situation where almost half a million Irish people are unemployed, Greece is on the edge of anarchy and America is slipping back into recession.

This is a magnificent read and perhaps that is a clue to its major weakness. I kept wondering, “How can a story so compelling be accounting for all the nuances that do justice to reality?” Yet it isn’t an academic treatise on the history of the financial collapse and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is the story of how Eisman and his buddies, three lads in Cupertino and a neurologist with aspergers made a fortune by being some of the only people who were willing to actually call the mortgage boom junk.

I would love two more books by Lewis; a prequel and sequel. The mortgage boom was ultimately a political movement started by Clinton. How can such a noble idea, “Let us make it possible for more people to own their homes” have gone so wrong? And subsequently, why was only Lehmann allowed to collapse? The story of government intervention into a system that had despised social responsibility during the “good times” needs to be unfurled in a similar, accessible fashion.

A superb book.

Your Correspondent, Remarried to Lady Liquor