Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

I could summarize this review in two words: read Gilead.  Now I know what you might be thinking—I’m not taking much of a risk in lauding a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I’m not always on the same page, so to speak, with the judges of such awards.  For the most recent instance, I found Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to be tiresome and repetitive, despite the strength of his other work; alas, it wins the Pulitzer.  (Is there a reason he ignores apostrophes, or is McCarthy simply waiting for a master’s thesis explaining it?)

 

Anyway, I was stunned by Robinson’s book, despite my initial reluctance to read it.  The synopsis put forth by reviewers was this: a dying minister in Iowa writes a memoir to his son.  How does that synopsis sell novels?  I got bored reading that summary. Well, apparently it did sell novels, and for good reason.  John Ames is an engaging, powerful, and vulnerable character, and perhaps it is the latter trait that makes him—and the novel—so engaging.  I was caught off guard so many times by his self-aware insecurities that I quickly lost my predisposition to ignore “preachy” types.  Yet moments arise when he says something so profound, and in a quiet manner, that I was forced to stop reading and contemplate his words.  And no, I am not religious, which is why my reaction to the book surprised me.  I won’t quote any such moments for two reasons: first, that would remove them from the context of the rest of his words, a context that establishes the profundity of his statement; second, readers will clearly find such passages on their own without my hand-holding.

 

I also found that this novel steered my reading; more specifically, John Ames forced me to slow down, stop flipping pages to “see what happens,” and simply dwell on his words.  This is one mark of an excellent book—like the unparalleled Moby-Dick, Gilead teaches us how to read, how to wrestle with the language and ideas rather than rushing through to get to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page.  (I now see, on the back cover blurb, that a reviewer for the New York Times makes a similar claim—and s/he says it much better than I do—but I’m keeping my comments because they bear repeating.) 

 

Perhaps most surprisingly, I felt humbled after reading this novel.  I’m not sure if younger readers will “get” it, as the novel seems to mandate a certain intellectual and spiritual experience and vain surety that must be broken down, but it is well worth the effort for anyone to try.

William Gibson’s Spook Country

For this first book review, I have chosen to start with a new book by one of my favorite writers, William Gibson. Even if we bracket his position as coining and developing the word (and concept) “cyberspace,” Gibson remains one of the most powerful voices in American fiction today. In particular, his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, was one of the best books I have read in awhile. His ability to engage with advertising and consumption, pinpoint the role of the Web in information distribution, explore technological developments from Curta calculators to the edited “footage,” and trace the porous boundaries of nations and cultures in one novel was an incredible feat, and it was with great anticipation that I awaited his follow-up, Spook Country.

I won’t say I was disappointed, because the novel was, well, acceptable, but it didn’t have the same energy as Pattern Recognition, even though it too explored technology, porous national boundaries, technological developments, etc. It seemed instead like a Pattern Recognition lite, almost as if it (Spook Country) should have preceded its predecessor, like an opening band before the headliner. I won’t try to summarize the plot (its publisher has a hard enough time making sense of the various strands) but I will note that as interesting as all the strands are—the musician turned reporter turned pawn (but whose pawn?) or the junkie/hostage who translates Russian, for instance—they never fully work. They could have, but not in this novel. While the various elements come together at the end in Gibson’s familiar Vancouver, it’s not in a way that is particularly striking or exciting. It works, somewhat, but it’s not what I had hoped for after Pattern Recognition.

I will also add that I better understand my students’ trouble in “getting” Gibson, particularly his language. At times, it seems like Gibson is trying too hard to make an interesting observation, and instead of creating a unique image, he instead belabors the point. Take this example: “The world outside the restaurant’s windows, beyond words in a red plastic Cantonese neither of them could read, was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for decades in a drawer.” This example, together with others scattered around, becomes cumbersome rather than enlightening and slows the pace of the novel. Luckily, these heady images gradually disappear after the first quarter of the novel, almost as if the plot, once set in motion, loosens up his language, like a muscle after a warm up, slightly bathed in a gym’s florescent light, one whose glare has dimmed over time and shaded by the incandescent mist of . . . oh, you get the point.

I will say, though, that the most interesting element of the novel for me was not the idea of surveillance or people who work in the gray area between the law and crime, but in his perception of locative art. If Neuromancer unveiled cyberspace to mass readership, then Spook Country will do the same for locative art. Driven by GPS, locative art allows artists to create virtual works that are present only in particular places and only to those who have the proper apparatus to see them. Thus, Gibson shows one artist creating an image of River Phoenix outside of the Viper Room, allowing the viewers to witness the dead star whenever they look at the actual nightclub. To me, this is where Gibson’s vision is most acute, and this is why this novel will resonate. It is not his best book, but it reveals once more Gibson’s ability to show us where we might be headed.