Literary Pairings
Hey Friends,
The theme of the July newsletter is Pairings. I also want to recognize the importance of Juneteenth last month and the recent passing of the great Alice Munro, a story writer who can be credited with helping to bring realism back from the brink in the 80s, after it was almost swallowed by the Beats and post-modernists of the 60s and 70s.
As a young writer fresh to the business then, I had no idea who I should be reading and so was into the best-selling comic mayhem being dished out by Douglas Adams, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins -- remember Tom Robbins? -- and Erica Jong, books that prodded Americans to laugh again after Vietnam and Watergate, Charles Manson and Patty Hearst. But I sensed I should also be reading classics and so launched into Dickens and James, Cervantes and the Brontes. Though frankly the pairing of older titles with new did nothing but horrify. For one thing, how could Vonnegut and Charlotte Bronte exist in the same universe? Had gravity failed? Were both good writers? If so, in what way?
For a time, I clung to my post-modern roots. But then I began to read from two specific decades, the 50s and the 80s, so Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver. And it seemed to me that, during the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, a black hole opened up and ate realism. Everything was flipped on its head for a time. And then just as suddenly it flipped back. It's impossible to overstate how unsettling this was to a beginner, leaving me forever unsure whether modern or post-modern approaches to storytelling express the highest aims of art. To this day I'm not sure. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.
On to the theme of this issue, which is Pairings. Like wine and cheese, certain books just seem to go together and can be even better when enjoyed in pairs. In the same way that we don't fully understand our spouse until we meet the family, we may not really appreciate a book until we read its relatives. Let's lead off with a fascinating pairing of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967) and Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo (1955). A new translation of the Rulfo book was just released, a title Marquez read prior to writing his immortal classic. Both books deal in the special deep time or dream time of Central America. Reading them, you may wonder when a certain event is occurring relative to others and the answer is always. Rulfo even uses special punctuation (French quotes) in addition to dashes and quotations to set off dialogue occurring at different points in time, creating many indistinct layers of time. Both books recount that incredibly infamous incident in organized labor's history -- the Banana Massacre, Colombia, 1928 -- when troops fired on striking banana workers, killing as many as 3,000.
Here are more recommendations:
< The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940) and Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947) > : Two tragedies about the darkest sides of Mexico's socialist revolution with allusions to Spain's ongoing civil war which is dramatized in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Picasso's painting Guernica (1937).
< The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939) and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970) > : Two Hollywood novels published thirty years apart. Both take on the question of what's wrong with movie people, and Hollywood, though the Didion book approaches this from a female perspective that feels strangely fresh and relevant.
< Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell Jr (1959) and The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984) > : Two episodic novels that use dozens of vignettes to dramatize long slow changes in two women's lives, one a white Midwesterner with a great house, the other a Latina in urban Chicago with no house at all.
< Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938) and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952) > : Two writers with little in common other than Catholicism produced these novels about a teenaged street-gang leader named Pinkie and a heretical Southern preacher named Hazel. O'Connor once said that she learned the key to plot in fiction ("throwing the weight of circumstance against the favored character") by reading Greene.
< Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847) and Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys > : In Bronte's novel, the main obstacle to love between hero Jane and male lead Rochester is his Caribbean first wife who has gone stark-raving mad and is locked in the attic. Rhys -- born in the Caribbean herself -- read Bronte's book then wrote two of her own that revealed enough racism and misogyny in English society to drive anyone insane.
< The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright (2021) and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) > : Despite the recent pub date, Wright's book about a black man chased down into a major city's sewers by police, actually came first, in 1942, but was only recently published. Wright mentored the younger Ellison and let him read the book when it was finished. At the time, nobody would publish it. Ellison then wrote his own novel about a different black man, living in the New York underground who winds up there after falling down an open manhole in the midst of a Harlem riot. Ellison's book, clearly part-homage to Wright's, goes into greater detail about the hero's background and path to becoming an outcast from both black and white society.
< Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977), The Battle of Dienbienphu by Jules Roy (1965), and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (1990) > : Michael Herr was a correspondent in Vietnam in an age when any journalist could jump on any gunship with an empty seat, at any firebase in the entire theater of war, and ride it straight into a hot zone. His book is a candid look inside a tide-turning year in the Vietnam War when it became clear the US would lose. While Herr is in the country, he sees many people reading a book by Jules Roy about the battle of Dienbienphu, a tide-turning battle during the French occupation of Vietnam when it also became clear the French would lose. Before Vietnam vet Tim O'Brien wrote his novel The Things They Carried, he read Herr's book. O'Brien has said Herr's book was essential in creating his.
< The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939), On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957), and Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) > : If we wonder what happened to the Joad family after the Depression and into the post-war generation, we need look no further than Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise of On the Road. They are the heirs apparent of the nomadic Joads, constantly headed west for a better life. In Kerouac's hands, the quest morphs into a search for the source of male restlessness and discontent, bringing us in a circle to the ending of Gulliver when he returns home and cannot look at his children as they remind him of that foolish, warring rabble he met on his travels, the Yahoos.
A good documentary for Boomers or those who were twentysomething in the 80s is Andrew McCarthy's Hulu film "Brat Pack" about all those brat-pack and brat-pack-adjacent actors and films from way back when. A highlight is the meeting between Andrew, whose career was defined and likely stunted by the label, and journalist David Blum who coined it.
For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.