My Take: “Things Fall Apart”, Chinua Achebe’s first novel, is a seminal work in the modern literary cannon. Released in 1958, it was one of the works of literature written from the African perspective that was widely read in the West. This, combined with Achebe’s outspoken stance on the representation of Africa in the Western cannon, gives “Things Fall Apart” a significance beyond its (not insubstantial) literary merit. In short, there are cultural, literary and historical dividends from reading this book.

Achebe took the title of “Things Fall Apart” from a Keats poem about the collapse of European societies in the aftermath of World War I titled “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

It’s disturbing prose and an ideal allegory for the book’s overarching theme– the wholesale upheaval in the normal order of things in African society brought on by the arrival of European colonisers. Achebe explores his theme through the eyes of Okonwo, an esteemed patriarch in a small tribe in pre-colonial Africa. Okonwo is born of humble origins but rises to a position of high status in his village through many years of hard work and personal, emotional sacrifice. Okonwo is someone who has invested much to progress according to the norms of pre-colonial African society.  Inevitably, the violent change in social norms and the loss of equilibrium brought on by the arrival of European settlers hits Okonwo more than most.

Achebe paints a convincing portrait of how the arrival of Europeans broke down the bonds and structures that held pre-colonial African society together. Interestingly, he dedicates particular attention to examining the impact of European missionaries and the spread of Christianity on tribal society. The animistic religions of tribal Africa were the foundation stone of societal organisation. As these religions were the primary source of power in these societies, the spread of Christianity and its active hostility to these beliefs, did not just cause a spiritual upheaval, but also resulted in a wholesale destabilisation of society.

“Things Fall Apart” is interesting in a cultural sense as Achebe consciously wrote the book in an effort to counter the negative stereotypes of African society perpetuated by turn of the century European authors like Joseph Conrad. However, the book really doesn’t have the feel of a public service announcement. Okonwo is far from a likeable hero – in fact in a lot of respects he really is a stupid and nasty piece of work. However, Achebe skilfully reveals the human drivers for his stupidity and nastiness. Okonwo isn’t nice – but he’s significant from a literary perspective for the mere fact that the story is told from his perspective as a complex human being influenced by the forces around him rather than as an outsiders view of a simple animalistic brute.

Highlight:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

My Take: “Spring Snow” is generally regarded to be Yukio Mishima’s greatest masterpiece. The first instalment in his epic Sea of Fertility tetraology, an allegorical examination of the Westernisation of Japanese society between 1912 and 1975, “Spring Snow” was a best seller on its release despite Mishima’s political unpalatability.

At the most basic level, “Spring Snow” tells the story of star crossed lovers, Kiyoaki Matsugae and Satoko Ayakura, as narrated by Kiyoaki’s stoic best friend Shigekuni Honda. While the financial prosperity of Kiyoaki’s family and the aristocratic standing Satoko’s family made the couple a mutually beneficial pairing, Kiyoaki’s initial equivocation about their relationship allowed Satoko to be betrothed to a member of the Imperial household. However, once Satoko’s matrimonial commitment makes her unattainable, Kiyoaki’s feelings for her crystallise and the pair are set on a course for self-destruction.

While “Spring Snow” starts slowly, dwelling on the characteristics of the alien and hermetically sealed Japanese aristocratic society, as Kiyoaki and Satoko’s relationship builds momentum towards its inevitable conclusion the story develops a gut wrenching intensity. It really does have an emotional weight that leaves you physically weak upon completion.

However, this novel is more than just a Japanese “Romeo and Juliet”. Like all of Mishima’s works, the real emotional impetus for “Spring Snow” flows from the deep internal conflicts within the author and the broader Japanese society. I’ve written before about the contradictions inherent in Mishima’s life as a homosexual fascist bodybuilder/writer but the force of these conflicting desires is writ large in “Spring Snow”.

While societal pressure plays a role in heightening the tension of “Spring Snow”, the fundamental conflict in the novel is internal to Kiyoaki. The protagonist’s alternating ambivalence, hostility and obsessive love for Satoko is the main source of tension in the book and mirrors Mishima’s love/hate relationship for the changing Japan. Kiyoaki doesn’t know whether to welcome the opening up of Japanese society or resist its Westernisation and as such is conflicted about how to deal with this contradiction within Satoko who, by virtue of her position as the daughter of an aristocratic family, is at the forefront of these changes. “Spring Snow” is much more than a simple story of obsessive or forbidden love.

“Spring Snow” isn’t an easily accessible novel and Mishima doesn’t make any concessions to the reader in terms of exposition. It’s literary fiction in its purest form and as with all Mishima novels, it’s prose is jaw-droppingly beautiful. It’s not airport reading, if you’re willing to put the effort in, it’s a rich and rewarding work.

Highlights:

“Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

Synopsis:

My Take: Yes, I admit have particular preferences when it comes to my reading habits. I read more than my share of modern Asian fiction, Kennedy biographies and blokey Australian literature. However, I do consciously try to read outside of my comfort zone on a fairly regular basis. I figure even if it’s not to my tastes, at least I’m broadening my horizons (and have one more topic that I can bullshit my way through a conversation about).

Enter Anais Nin. I remember shortly after reading Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” thinking that I really didn’t read many female writers and that I should make more of an effort to challenge my ignorant and patriarchal biases. So I figured I’d dive into the deep end with some of the chickyist femo-lit around – Anais Nin’s semi-infamous diaries of sexual awakening and literary exploration in 1930s Paris with Henry and June Miller.

I promise that I did come to this with an open mind. I was looking for enrichment and broadening of horizons. Unfortunately, what I found was a bit of a mess. Nin is a poetic and whimsical writer, but even in the edited version I read, the internal monologue got tiring pretty quickly. Nin’s frank writing about her sexual awakening and liberation might have been enough to carry the book in an earlier time, but I wonder about its relevance today. I suppose that I should give Nin a leave pass on this one given that she never intended the diaries to be published, but even disregarding the lack of narrative framing for an external audience, there wasn’t much in the diaries that made me think that I would enjoy Nin’s writing/perspectives/insights in a fictional context.

Highlight: I would include a highlight, but a lot of it is NSFW so I think I’ll take the path of discretion…

My Take: Ulysses is my literary white whale. I’ve sat down to try and read it a couple of times, but have never had the requisite endurance or appreciation. I get the feeling that I will enjoy it one day, but I’m just not ready yet.

In this regard, I think I have to endorse Gary Dexter’s observations on Ulysses “How Books Got Their Titles”:

In 2006 the poet laureate Andrew Motion recommended that all schoolchildren read Ulysses as part of their essential grounding in English literature. One can see why. To read Ulysses is to realize that the whole of twentieth-century literature is little more than a James Joyce Appreciation Society. … But in another way his suggestion was absurd. Ulysses is not a book for children. It is barely even a book for adults. The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.

I’ve no idea how long it will remain unread on my bookshelf, but I know I’ll get there one day.

Highlight: I’m sure there are many, but so far all I’ve got from my aborted attempts to finish “Ulysses” is neck strain as I watched the meaning constantly soaring over my head. Sigh.

Update: Have just seen that ANZLit Blog is having a group read of Ulysses – I might have to give it (yet) another go…

My Take: It took me a while to give Gore Vidal a try. As regular readers know, I have a bit of hero worship thing going on with Robert Kennedy. And while Vidal was the step-brother by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy and therefore technically Bobby’s step-brother-in-law-by-marriage-one-removed, the pair famously did not get along.

As a result, my early exposure to Vidal came consisted entirely of a series of highly unflattering accounts in various Kennedy biographies. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr, court historian to the Kennedys writes in his magisterial “Robert Kennedy and his Times” (extracted from Google Books), their relationship was strained from the start:

Bobby hated Vidal’s pretension (and let’s be frank, his homosexuality) and Vidal hated Bobby’s ruthlessness and impertinence and frequently spoke out against RFK whilst on the campaign trail.

This natural bias against Vidal was further entrenched by the fact that Vidal was similarly estranged from another of my literary favourites, Norman Mailer. Amusingly enough, the feud between this pair of US literary giants culminated in Mailer:

Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée.

All of which I was very familiar with before having read a single word of Vidal’s writing. So you’ll forgive me if I thought Vidal’s critical bite was bigger than his literary bark.

That was however, before I read “Lincoln”. Put simply, it’s a tour de force. Historical fiction is an extremely difficult medium to do well. How do you go about credibly writing dialogue for a figure that has been canonised to the extent of Lincoln? If you want to see how badly it can go wrong, go no further than the television mini-series adaptation of “Lincoln” staring Mary Tyler Moore. Fast forward past the credits until you get to the stilted dialogue and overacting and get ready to cringe – it takes a talented writer indeed to avoid coming across as hackneyed or clichéd with subject matter like this.

In “Lincoln”, Vidal pulls off this difficult task with aplomb. Telling his story from multiple perspectives (the primary narrator being Lincoln’s presidential secretary, and later Secretary of State, John Hay),Vidal vividly recreates the world of Civil War era Washington and the massive figures that inhabited it. Luckily, there’s plenty of action in the period for Vidal to draw on to keep his plot moving forward too. Putting to one side the obvious drama of the Civil War, the constant political machinations of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, principally his Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, is enough to drive the narrative of a political thriller in its own right.

Highlight: Not from the book itself, but from Vidal’s public response to a critical review of “Lincoln” in The New York Times by a historian unhappy with the historical accuracy of the book. Vidal describes his reviewer as “the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era” and “pleasantly scatterbrained” then goes on to state:

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, [Vidal] claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (’hagiographers,’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.

Now it is true as I said on the King show that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle, and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson.

Quite!

My Take: I have a very warm spot in my heart for David Malouf. He’s the kind of writer that I would love to be – a poet who divides his time between writing classical allegories set in the Roman Empire and stories of humid days and stormy nights spent on the decks of Queenslander houses. He’s living proof that “Queensland literary giant” is no oxymoron and as such I cling to him dearly.

“Johnno” isn’t Malouf’s best work (I’ll plump for the Miles Franklin winning The Great World in this respect), but as a fellow Queenslander, it is my favourite. No other book I’ve read quite evokes the experiences and outlook of the Great Northern State quite like Malouf’s first book, “Johnno”. While the Brisbane City Council may not usually be recognised as a noted judge of literary achievement, its recent selection of “Johnno” as the book that best represents Brisbane was spot on.

While quite short and simply written, “Johnno” is a complex and layered book. In a funny way, “Johnno” is part Hugh Lunn, part Aeschylus. At the most basic level, it is a lovingly told coming of age story of two unlikely friends in 1940s and 50s Brisbane. Thematically however, Malouf piles many layers of meaning into this work. I’m no literary expert, but to my mind the most interesting part of this book is how Malouf uses the evolving relationship between the urbane but insecure auto-biographical protagonist, ‘Dante’ and his hedonistic and superficially assured best friend Johnno as a platform for exploring Malouf’s evolving perceptions of place and family.

On the one hand, throughout his youth Dante/Malouf envies Johnno’s bravura and seemingly blissfully relaxed approach to life. While he feels like an outsider, Dante/Malouf genuinely wants to fit into the simple, happy, physical lifestyle in Brisbane that his father long enjoyed. On the other hand, Dante/Malouf is repelled by Johnno’s lack of refinement and ambition. Dante/Malouf sees himself as ultimately being apart from Brisbane, an intellectual and sophisticate with broader horizons and ambitions than other Queenslanders.

Unfortunately, as a young man, Dante/Malouf invariably failed to see that his perceptions of Johnno/his father/Brisbane were more a function of his insecurity than their shallowness. Throughout the majority of the novel Dante/Malouf views Johnno/his father/Brisbane in black and white. As a result he feels the need to reject what he feels Johnno/his father/Brisbane stand for in order to validate his own, broader intellectual ambitions.

In this regard, Dante/Malouf’s strident complaints about Brisbane ring true to anyone who grew up there:

‘I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.’

‘Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.’

However, the fact that these complaints are so familiar directly undermine any justification for Dante/Malouf’s sense of separateness.  Dante/Malouf was never as isolated and stifled in Brisbane as he thought as a young man. Many of those around him who he had written off as dully shallow and suburban had similar rich internal lives and ambitions. However, it is only when looking back with the benefit of age and the perspective of having lived in Paris, Italy and London that Malouf is able to realise that Johnno/his father/Brisbane were far more nuanced and complex than he had given them credit for.

Malouf has a real talent for bringing out these realisations in the most affecting ways. In one of the saddest moments of the book, Johnno’s last letter to Dante before his suicide reveals that he had always admired the intellectual qualities in Dante that he had thought Johnno had misunderstood, describing him as:

‘the most exotic creature — so strange and untouchable. Like a foreign prince’.

Similarly, when sorting through his father’s belongings soon after his death, Dante is forced to similarly revaluate his perceptions of his Father:

‘Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.’

In this way, I think “Johnno” is a story about what all Queenslanders go through at some point in their lives – the process of revaluating the black and white judgements of their youth about the place in which they grew up. “Johnno” is about the process of leaning that while Queensland is far from the most cosmopolitan place in the world, neither is it a cultural backwater devoid of the human experience. Life might still seem impossibly boring there, but it’s ultimately the people that make a place what it is. If you make the effort to look below the surface, you’ll see that the people of Queensland are just as complex and nuanced participants in the human experience as anyone else. It might not make you feel as special or unique to admit it, but it opens up a world of enriching relationships that might never have realised existed.

Highlights:

‘Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.’

….

‘The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.’

Synopsis:

My Take: The way I remember it (and it could have course been completely different for everyone else), the mid-90s were a strangely depressing time. The Cold War was over, but instead of celebrating the lifting of this looming an existential threat, the Western world seemed to fall into a crisis of meaning. At a time when academics were proclaiming ‘The End of History’, people seemed to start asking “What’s the point?”. The great political and ideological struggles seemed to have been fought and people were left to contemplate a boring life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Personal angst flowed into the void created be the removal of political tension. This vibe seemed to change with the arrival of a new existential/ideological challenge in the form of the Global War on Terror, but there was a brief window when cynicism and resignation seemed to pervade the public mind.

To me, “The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming” felt like it was written in the middle of this mid-90s funk. The themes of the book – soulless corporatism and hollow relationships – combined with its method of delivery – a brooding internal monologue – gave the book a bleak feel that just didn’t speak to me. The writing’s not bad (if a little monotonous at times) but it just seemed unnecessarily bleak to me. Maybe this book would have connected with me more when it was written, but the crisis of meaning that seemed to underpin the stories just didn’t seem relevant to me today.

Highlights:

‘Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.’

…

‘Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same and no one know how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines you choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.’

My Take: Here’s the thing about Augusten Burroughs. I love him – at its best, his writing zings and fizzles with caustic, but good natured wit. Sadly, my fiancée’s first exposure to him was via his least impressive work; his most recent effort ‘Wolf at the Table’. She wasn’t impressed, and to be honest, neither was I. This state of affairs is doubly unfortunate as it has led me to evangelise Burroughs to her even more than I ordinarily would. It’s a conundrum – the more I push it, the more the pressure will increase, building up the expectation to heights that can’t possibly be met and decreasing the likelihood that she will like him at all. It’s a strange thing this compulsion to bully your friends into liking the books that you yourself loved.

Anyway, I’m hoping that the next Burroughs’ book that she picks up (after I subtly wear her down) will be “Magical Thinking”. His life as a neurotic, gay, New York advertising executive turned best selling author with an excess of personal baggage from a truly bizarre childhood provides a rich subject matter. In this context, Burroughs’ furtive attempts to develop healthy, loving relationship with a partner in spite of his calamitous personal history are warmly and amusingly told:

”I must ease people into the facts of me, not deposit large, undigested chunks of my history at their feet. Too much of me too fast is toxic.” ….

”My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a ’survivor’ of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education.” ….

”(The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.”

However, while Burroughs shows a little more of himself in this book than say “Running with Scissors” but the star of “Magical Thinking” is still Burroughs’ writing. The prose in this book sparkles like a Burroughs concentrate. Burroughs’ masterful dry wit is sprinkled liberally throughout the pages of “Magical Thinking” and his narrative asides are a delight:

“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.”  ….

”Telemarketers… (are) calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy?” ….

‘I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.’

“Magical Thinking” is one of those books that leaves you giggling and chortling throughout. Highly recommended.

Highlight: “Roid Rage” the story of the time Burroughs’ spent using steroids in order to live up to the buffed stereotypes of New York’s gay dating scene”

‘To nobody’s surprise, steroid use is common among gay men. When you combine a love for men with a love for drama, you end up with a guy on steroids.’  …

‘I said – I’m doing it for medical reasons’ my boyfriend would reply ‘your vanity is not a medical reason.’ ….

‘On typical days, (dust) is simply irritating. On Roid Rage days, it made me want to stomp down to the highway, pull drivers out of their cars, and bash their faces into pavement; Suck up that dirt like a good little Electrolux, Jersey Boy Bitch.’  ….

‘It’s weird. The day after I get the shot, I’m usually fine. It’s the day after this where I turn into somebody capable of committing a triple homicide, then going to a Ben Stiller movie.’

My Take: Bitchiness like this can only come from personal experience and unsurprisingly this novel is apparently based on Waugh’s own experience as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in the lead up to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Similarly, the arrogant, abrasive and ignorant owner of the Daily Beast is allegedly (and plausibly) an amalgam of the infamous Lord Beaverbrook (the first of the media barons) and Lord Northcliffe (a contemporary rival).

Far be it from me to make comment on the media, but the jaded political hack in me enjoyed the satirical skewering of the fourth estate in ‘Scoop’. It’s worth remembering too that this withering account was penned in the 1930s – a period that would be viewed as something of a golden era of the press, especially when seen from today’s climate of plummeting newspaper audiences, even faster fallings revenues and resulting cost cutting. Unfortunately, a Scoop for the modern era would be more tragedy than farce.

Highlight:

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

They are all negros. And the Fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?

My Take: In my first year at university I went through a bit of a nihilistic phase in my reading. I started devouring authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, J. D. Salinger and above all, Bret Easton Ellis. I can’t say I really know what precipitated this phase – maybe it was just the first time I had had the opportunity to access literature like this having just left small town Queensland for the (relative) retail literary diversity of the Gold Coast (you mean there are alternatives to Dymocks??). My own outlook on life wasn’t particularly grim at the time and I certainly wasn’t some kind of Goth/Emo morbidly luxuriating in the negativity of it all.  But I do recall feeling that experiencing the darkest perspectives of literature would enrich my appreciation of the more uplifting things in life. In this sense, I can certainly say that having worked through the Brett Easton Ellis cannon, I felt much more optimistic about my experience of the human condition.

“Less Than Zero” is a relatively brief, very tightly written debut novel that Ellis published at the obscene age of 19(!). While it’s not as rich or layered as his later works (in particular “American Psycho”) it’s fair to say it was spectacularly successful, becoming a best-seller and being adapted as a movie starring Robert Downey Jr.  Appropriately described by one Amazon reviewer as being “like The Catcher in the Rye on Crack”, “Less Than Zero” is a harrowing exploration of the alienation and disconnection of the children of the wealthy elite of LA in the 1980s. Given Ellis’ own privileged LA upbringing, it’s difficult not to see him writing from personal experience here.

While I can’t say I’m too sympathetic to “Poor Rich Boy” literature in general, “Less Than Zero” is notable for its extremism if nothing else. Amidst the pages of this thin novel, the protagonist and his fellow travellers manage to confront or engage in endemic drug use, forced prostitution, anorexia, rape, paedophilia and a snuff film.  It’s seriously full-on stuff and ultimately no surprise that a novelist that could produce a debut like this would ultimately go on to pen something like “American Psycho”. However, despite its grotesque extremity, the most striking aspect of the book is the all encompassing numbness of its characters.  While the protagonist has a vague conception that he should be disturbed by what he is confronting, he is unable to feel anything beyond the generalised anxiety he feels about life as a whole. I guess this is kind of the point of nihilistic literature and I remember appreciating its import at the time, but in retrospect I can’t really see the appeal.

Highlight: The opening paragraph of “Less Than Zero” perfectly captures the sense of disconnection that pervades the rest of the book:

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than “I’m pretty sure Muriel is anorexic” or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blair’s car. All it comes down to is the fact that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge. “