Month: November 2004

Dell
1968
When I was in the 5th Year (the equivalent of 10th grade in the States), I had a most excellent English teacher called Mr. Arbon. Our class was a bit above the usual, personally selected in the 4th for “advanced studies” and so were only about 15 in total. Twice during the year, Mr. Arbon would assign a book report, and choose individual books for all of us. The first time I was given Catcher in the Rye and the second time it was Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Imagine writing a book report on that–I was too busy picking up bits of my blown mind to really write a report of any coherence, though I did respond by writing my own Brautigan-inspired short stories. Mr. Arbon then lent me all the other Brautigan books he owned, which was nearly all of them, but not quite.
In Watermelon Sugar was one of the missing, and I only read it recently. It’s a thin book, just over 100 pages, and took me most of a day to read. How does Brautigan fare now? Well, I like him just fine, actually.
The story of “In Watermelon Sugar” describes a writer living in a sort of “new Eden”-like commune, a town called Watermelon Sugar, which also processes watermelons for all sorts of fantastical things. There is the main gathering place, called iDeath, and a villain of sorts, inBOIL, who represents the old ways. It’s a novel of dualities–Watermelon Sugar is both a place and a thing; the location is both wilderness and city; it is finite and infinite. There are two women the writer gets involved with, one who goes astray and one who doesn’t. There is a joy of life about the inhabitants, but death is a constant presence.
Brautigan’s style is at times close to Japanese haiku in its economy of language and the jumps it makes line to line.
Over time Brautigan came to symbolize the hippy movement to many, and the idyllic nature of this novel suggests why–a glimpse of a downhome utopia threaded through with a gentle surrealism borne of the American forest. It’s sort of my spiritual home.
By the way, there’s a much better essay on the novel, which unearths its Christian mythos over at the Brautigan archive. There’s also a more recent musing on the name of iDeath in an era of iPods and iMacs. Finally, here’s a sample of the first few pages.

The Adobe Bookstore in San Francisco decided for one week to arrange their books by color. Why? Why not?

Picador
2001
Michael Chabon’s imaginary tale of two revolutionary comic book creators in the late ’30s/early ’40s has a wealth of pleasures for the comic book fan. Those who know their history, from Superman and the hero boom up through to the Wertham hearings of the 1950s (the comic book industry’s own McCarthy trials) and beyond to the birth of Marvel, will smile to see how Chabon fits Kavalier and Clay into this timeline and not step on any toes.
The novel moves quickly, jumping from Joe Kavalier’s magical flight from Prague as the Nazis close in, rooming with his cousin Sammy Clay in New York City, and the birth of their comic book character the Escapist. Chabon’s imagery and metaphor is simultaneously surface-level and subconscious. Joe’s escape from the Nazis directly leads to the creation of the character that will make Empire Comics millions, but as the novel progresses, both characters find themselves struggling against their own mind-forg’d manacles. Joe feels survivors’ guilt over his family, and eventually runs off to escape his failure, joining the armed forces to fight the Nazis. Sammy meanwhile is trapped by his sexuality, becoming trapped in “the closet.” Then there’s Rosa, Joe’s love from almost the first time he sees her (naked, by accident, who winds up trapped by circumstance.
Celebrity cameos dot the novel (as somebody noted somewhere, it’s a sign of post-modernity that only by including celebrities into historical fiction do we feel the character exist in “reality”) from Orson Welles (K&C attend the premiere of Citizen Kane) to Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. By this section–where Chabon suggests that the radical storytelling used in Welles’ film influences K&C, and Kavalier becomes a sort of amalgamation of Will Eisner and Gil Kane–I was starting to lose interest. Clay discovers his sexuality when he falls in love with the radio star playing the Escapist for broadcast. Kavalier foils a bomb plot by an anti-Semite. Then Chabon throws Pearl Harbor in the mix (we know it’s coming, but we don’t see it coming) and the section of the novel where Kavalier goes slightly batty stationed in Antarctica. This turned out to be my favorite part, actually–something about humans in extreme situations are always suspenseful, and also because it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, “The Thing” (John Carpenter).
The rest of the novel follows the fallout from this central episode, where Kavalier can finally indulge his own superhero fantasies of battling Nazis, and finds himself wanting. And once again the themes of lost fathers and father-figures comes full circle.
It took me a bit longer than necessary to get through what is actually a book that demands a quick read, but every moment I spent with it was, well, pure escape.