Author Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, "Are You My Mother?" is at once a sequel and reply to the powerful and successful "Fun Home." Both books are cAuthor Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, "Are You My Mother?" is at once a sequel and reply to the powerful and successful "Fun Home." Both books are challenging and intelligent, telling their respective stories with gymnastic flexibility and at times bewildering non-linearity. However, whereas Fun Home was a brilliant tour-de-force, Are You My Mother? is a very mixed bag. Specifically, while Fun Home exemplifies the very best of what literary nonfiction can achieve, Are You My Mother? is instead a cautionary tale of the traps literary nonfiction can set for itself.
A detailed dissection of why Are You My Mother? falls flat requires an equally close examination of Fun Home, which is required reading. The author assumes that everyone has read the previous volume carefully and recently, making no efforts to reintroduce the themes and cast of her childhood. Understanding why Fun Home works and this book doesn't hinges on the author's notion of truth as a literary process.
Fun Home focused on growing up, with a particular focus on her father; indeed the purpose of the first book was to explore his life in order to make sense of his death (and possible suicide). Having a literary mindset, Bechdel's tools for pursuing that investigation into her own past were to juxtapose the events of her early life against points of literary reference. For example, her college years are framed through the lens of Joyce's Ulysses, not necessarily because Joyce provided the best objective lens, but rather because she was reading Joyce at the time, and consequently her understanding of that era of her life is commingled with that exposure. It is an honest and overtly subjective approach that never claims to present the whole truth. This works particularly well because the four acts of Fun Home each play off of a different literary focus, allowing the reader to triangulate.
Contrastingly, Are You My Mother? focuses on Bechdel's adult life, on her relationship with her mother and two of her therapists, and on (confusingly) the writing of both the previous and current books. The crucial and fatal difference is that whereas the first book used four works of fiction as different points of reference, this book uses only one major landmark: The psychoanalytic theories of Donald Winnicott. Everything in this book is passed through the lens of psychoanalysis, and the effect is hobbling.
In the interest of full disclosure: I am a research psychologist by profession, so I speak with some authority when I say that, in the sciences, psychoanalysis is rightly viewed as pseudoscientific bunk. Indeed, the only university department where psychoanalysis still thrives is the English department. This is because psychoanalysis is the art of building webs of spurious association through anecdotal free-association. In other words, psychoanalysis is a 'reader response' version of history, in which analysts and patients are encouraged to build elaborate mythologies, reinterpreting the motivations of others based on faulty memories and suspect dream analysis. The result is at once narcissistic and conspiratorial, where the subjective truth is the only truth worth having, but is at the same time forever suspect thanks to the pernicious influence of the unconscious.
All of this leads to a memoir that could just as easily have been titled Are You My Therapist? Indeed, flip to any random page, and you are as likely to spot a panel in which Bechdel has transcribed entire paragraphs from one of Winnicott's books, or a panel in which she is talking to one of her multiple therapists, as you are to see her mother. The book is also laden with the jargon of psychoanalysis (sometimes defined for the reader, sometimes not), which are best understood as makeshift pseudoscientific symbols: Literary tools masquerading as scientific terms.
In the end, we come away with the sense that Bechdel is someone who, as the result of a lifetime of anxiety, writes her diaries and memoirs as a coping mechanism. He writes what she writes because she must, because it is the only defense mechanism she has mastered. This self-documentation is compulsive: Early in the book, she describes how, during her frequent phone conversations with her mother, she will quietly (and without mention) transcribe what her mother is saying instead of engaging fully in the conversation. This act of recording her own life as a way to inhabit it safely without fully living it is, in practice, what the entire book consists of. We come away with a precise sense of who Bechdel considers herself to be, while simultaneously having only a cursory sense of who her mother is, or how her mother has changed.
Admittedly, Bechdel is working under a powerful constraint: Unlike the subject of her first book, her mother is still alive, and this book's composition reflects the sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit fear on Bechdel's part that her compulsive documentation will sour her relationship with her mother. The twin forces of family diplomacy and making the subject of a work a a participant in its composition both impose real limits on the speculations that Bechdel will entertain; it also makes her honesty all the more brave. The book is also at the apex of Bechdel's graphical talent: The style of the drawings, at once meticulous and unruly (in the literal sense that she does not use rulers), is fully mature, and she certainly deserves credit for having drawn her life so clearly.
Late in the book (and late chronologically; the two are uncorrelated), Bechdel's mother reads her a quotation by Dorothy Gallagher about memoir (a genre Bechdel's mother is repeatedly described as being "suspicious" of). The quotation reads, "The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to server her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story." It is not unreasonable, in light of other fragments describing that era, that the quotation was read in a veiled passive-aggressive fashion, a way for her mother to defend herself against the then-fresh publication of Fun Home. Bechdel reacts to the quote enthusiastically, as if it is revelatory; we are not given enough context to determine if her mother feels the same way. So it goes for most of the book: Bechdel's focus is so completely and neurotically on herself that her mother is reduced to a psychoanalytic abstraction, a timeless mythological figure whose inner life is no more illuminated than it was at the conclusion of Fun Home. Frustratingly, the answer is to the title's question, Are You My Mother?, is "possibly not."...more
There's an old saw that science fiction necessarily consists of two kinds of stories: Familiar characters in unfamiliar settings, and unfamiliar charaThere's an old saw that science fiction necessarily consists of two kinds of stories: Familiar characters in unfamiliar settings, and unfamiliar characters in familiar settings. This has always struck me as (a) generally true and (b) fairly uninventive. It is with this in mind that I was really pleased with this collection.
Ms. Bellet has a talent for writing characters who are at once sympathetic and alien (or, often, aliens). These characters then inhabit worlds equally exotic, making for that rarest of combinations: The proverbial "foreigner abroad."
Anyone who enjoys having their imaginations given a good stretch would do well to give this collection a shot....more
Red Mars is a book that snuck up on me. It's a massive brick of a book, and at first I was contentedly chipping away at it, absorbing the copious embeRed Mars is a book that snuck up on me. It's a massive brick of a book, and at first I was contentedly chipping away at it, absorbing the copious embedded science and the ensemble cast, letting everything fall into place. It was only about halfway through the book that I began to realize how brilliant it was, because it was at that point that the setup really began to pay off.
What Red Mars does remarkably is inject the human element into what would otherwise be a dry, lifeless treatise on science and engineering. This consideration warps the science by pulling back the veil of objectivity and revealing the scientists to be ideological and passionate, working toward divergent ideals. It further asks not only what the exploration of Mars might look like, but more crucially asks how the colonization of Mars might unfold, with all due historical and economic consideration.
Throughout, the story is told from the perspectives of multiple characters, who see the world very differently. It is easy, as a reader, to imagine that the narration on the page is merely a record of how things are in a story, but author Kim Stanley Robinson expertly contrasts the perspectives of his characters, helping the reader to understand the limits of each of their visions. In this way the author succeeds at showing us Mars and the future through many different eyes.
Mars is itself, of course, the unspeaking companion of each of the narrators. Rendered in colossal detail, it is without question a character unto itself, changing over the course of the novel. Never has a setting been so completely realized in speculative fiction.
In sum, Red Mars may be summarized as follows: Humanity will shape the places it goes, and be shaped by them. As man terraforms Mars, so too will Mars areoform man....more
Nova Swing is a semi-sequel to Light, set in the same universe. It is, succinctly, also a much better book than its predecessor.
Like Light, the story Nova Swing is a semi-sequel to Light, set in the same universe. It is, succinctly, also a much better book than its predecessor.
Like Light, the story takes place in a bitterly dark far future, full of ambiguous realities, systemic criminality, and fleshly urges. As an aside, Nova Swing will be much more difficult to understand without having read Light first. Also like the previous volume, Nova Swing is an ensemble piece: It knits together well over a dozen characters, many of whom have surprising depth, and relies on their shaky interrelations to provide the scaffolding for an even more uncertain world.
Briefly, Nova Swing is about those living on the periphery of the "Saudade Site," a pocket of alternate reality into which thrill-seekers venture (with black-market "travel agents" as their guides) and out of which other, stranger beings and artifacts emerge. The cast is a cross-section of every part of this strange ecosystem, and the novel is a success in large part because it conveys the entire setting so richly as its own "metacharacter."
This isn't to say that Nova Swing doesn't have its shortcomings. As in Light, author M. John Harrison has saturated his prose with sexuality that is generally uncanny and disturbing. This trend is justified to an extent by the setting, but Harrison employs it to excess, such that he overshadows many of the more important (and more interesting) kinds of relationships that the novel explores.
This is, in fact, part of a greater tension that Harrison seems unable to escape. He at once tries to pull the reader in by writing frankly (or, depending on your tastes, crudely) about the human condition, but at the same time pushes the reader away through his emphasis of the freakish otherness of his set dressings. In the end, Harrison wants us to feel empathy in spite of ourselves, but also wants to show off how refined as sense of Otherness he can portray.
Fortunately, in Nova Swing, Harrison opts for the former at the expense of the latter. That is to say, he ultimately explores humanity rather than exploiting dehumanization, a pleasant reversal of his priorities in Light. As such, while it has its lumps (as well as more mundane pacing difficulties stemming from keeping to many characters active in the story), Nova Swing is a worthy accomplishment....more
Having just completed G枚del, Escher, Bach (or GEB) thirty years after it was originally published, I am astonished at how well it has aged. I am not iHaving just completed G枚del, Escher, Bach (or GEB) thirty years after it was originally published, I am astonished at how well it has aged. I am not in the least surprised, however, that the book remains widely misunderstood, particularly among those who sing its praise. In a sense, it having won the Pulitzer is a prime example of a monumental work winning for the wrong reasons.
What every reader can agree on is that GEB is tremendously clever. Despite being nominally a work of "nonfiction," author Douglas Hofstadter has woven a host of fictive and literary elements into the work in both obvious and subtle ways. Because these maneuvers (chiefly found in the "Dialogs" between Achilles, a Tortoise, and others that serve to embody certain principles under discussion) have a necessarily pedagogical objective, they lay out their cleverness for all to see. They are, in a sense, something like a clock that reveals its inner workings to the viewer and invites them to work through how it tells time. And, like such a device, the answers are often difficult. GEB is not an easy book, in that it politely requests that the reader not only follow the argument but be able show their work.
But these tricks (which is all they are, for all their delightful cleverness) are not the meaning of GEB - they are only the tools Hofstadter employs to convey that meaning. The underlying message of GEB is far more nuanced and subversive. Hofstadter builds a meticulous foundation linking formal logical systems (such as basic arithmetic proofs) to the far more slippery concepts of language, thinking, meaning, and self-reference.
I won't attempt to summarize Hofstadter's argument(s), as doing so in such a confined space will inevitably fall short of his own exhaustive (and exhausting) methodology. I will, however, highlight the two conclusions he draws that speak more powerfully to me:
(1) Any conceivable non-supernatural intelligence will necessarily be unable to fully understand itself.
(2) Any formal system that is sufficiently robust to make indirect self-reference is a foundation upon which intelligence may be represented.
The first conclusion, a consequence of , is the logical instantiation of that clever paradox "This is a false statement." Applied to the brain and to computers, it serves to demystify the positivist notion that complete knowledge is possible through technology. In fact, it is nothing short of a demonstration that omniscience is logically impossible. This 'pessimistic' (or 'realistic') message is plainly evident.
The second conclusion, however, is far more important. It argues, effectively, that intelligence as we know it (as well as intelligence as we cannot know it) can be achieved by systems that are composed of small, simple, "mindless" pieces. It is nothing short of an argument for the epigenesis of meaning, from which stems beauty.
The following passage, from the book's final chapter, captures the interplay of these two notions:
My feeling is that the process by which we decide what is valid or what is true is an art; and that it relies as deeply on a sense of beauty and simplicity as it does on rock-solid principles of logic or reasoning or anything else which can be objectively formalized. I am not saying either (1) truth is a chimera, or (2) human intelligence is in principle not programmable. I am saying (1) truth is too elusive for any human or any collection of humans ever to attain fully; and (2) Artificial Intelligence, when it reaches the level of human intelligence - or even if it surpasses it - will still be plagued by the problems of art, beauty, and simplicity, and will run up against these things constantly in its own search for knowledge and understanding.
For my part, finding this gem atop the Hofstadter's now-immortal ziggurat of reasoning is an empowering conclusion to a very elegant argument....more
It's difficult to pin down what the correct yardstick for evaluating a book like Light. In the end, it negotiates an uneasy truce between poetry, concIt's difficult to pin down what the correct yardstick for evaluating a book like Light. In the end, it negotiates an uneasy truce between poetry, concept fiction, and narrative storytelling, doing so at the expense of all aspects. Light isn't quite a novel, and author M. John Harrison seems perfectly content with this.
If the book fails, it does so to the extent that the author playfully intermixes elements that have a narrative purpose with those that are mere emotional set-dressing. Much has been made, for example, of the book's prominent and generally dysfunctional sex acts. What is galling, however, is how capricious and unnecessary most of them are. They serve little function beyond shocking the reader or throwing them off balance, except possibly conveying a uniformly cynical perspective on sexuality. While the poetry of this is clearly a matter of taste, these spectacles do little to enrich the book's more fundamental themes of prophesy, created life, and revelation.
The book has its share of small triumphs as well. Because it adopts a three-protagonist alternating-viewpoint style, it it able to play with themes and references in clever ways. Many of its secondary characters display surprising richness. Concerned as it is with spectacle, it frequently paints tableaux rich with interesting ideas, even if many of these ideas prove to be superfluous. Many reader, I suspect, will come to favor particular storylines on the basis of which ones have the characters and ideas that successfully strike a chord, although I imagine few readers will find all three equally fascinating.
Overall, I'm satisfied with the book as a Work, to the extent that it challenges the reader to pay attention and rewards efforts to work things out in advance. But just because I'm willing to let a few such books sit on my shelf doesn't mean I need too many more of its ilk to follow....more
Widely praised, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is a rare bit of time travel fiction: it tells a raw, powerful, and believably realistic story with a verWidely praised, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is a rare bit of time travel fiction: it tells a raw, powerful, and believably realistic story with a very minimal appeal to the "speculative fiction" toolbox. Collins takes the principles of time travel outlined in To Say Nothing Of The Dog and uses them to outline a far more grave and ambiguous story, departing from the farcical comedy of the preceding novel to address the grim subject of epidemics, particularly the Black Death.
The story follows two tracks, one in the 14th century and one in a very familiar 21st century. Both stories focus on epidemics, but do so with the striking contrasts. In the 14th century, the time travel canard permits us the perspective of epidemics in a context of total ignorance and surprise; in the near-future, a state of almost-overpreparedness for contagion reigns. At the same time, the events of the 14th century are known to us despite local ignorance, while the outcomes of the near future are totally uncertain despite advanced epidemiological techniques.
The tone of the book shifts markedly as time passes. It begins innocently enough, having the lighthearted "British comedy of errors" flavor that the author employed in To Say Nothing Of The Dog. This, is appears, is really a means of getting the reader involved in and invested in the medieval and modern characters, whose social networks are appropriately convoluted. The consequence is that when the respective epidemics finally reach full swing, the many resulting deaths have a great deal more impact. While this is arguably a manipulative technique reminiscent of Cerebus Syndrome, my opinion is that it is likely the most effective method to convey the grief and hardship of terminal disease outbreaks. Collins is not trying to betray the reader, in this regard: she is instead trying to be honest about an awful reality. When people get sick and die, especially before their time, it is tragic at a personal level no matter what the statistical size of the outbreak.
That said, the book is not perfect. Its later chapters are emotionally exhausting (which is as it should be), but leave a number of crucial points unresolved. In addition to its shift in tone, the story traffics in red herrings to heighten suspense, which is perhaps necessary to raise the stakes for the reader, but feel a tad overmanipulative in retrospect.
I felt that the book is deserving of the praise it has received, in that it achieves something few works of genre fiction manage: it conveys universally understood human experience in a rich, believable way. The challenge of telling a story about characters on the one hand and about something has wide in scope as disease on the other is no easy task, and Collins' success should be lauded. However, that balancing act requires sacrifices, and in some (arguably small-scale) ways, the strongest human elements of the book suffered for it....more
Michael Chabon's most famous (and Pulitzer-prize-winning) novel comes so preceded by a miasma of hype that it seemed, when cracking the book for the fMichael Chabon's most famous (and Pulitzer-prize-winning) novel comes so preceded by a miasma of hype that it seemed, when cracking the book for the first time, impossible for the actual work to live up. Happily, this is one book that fully deserves the near-universal and almost fanatical praise it has often received.
In plain terms, it tells the story of a Brooklyn Jew and a Czech Jew (cousins) living in New York during a span ranging from pre-war to post-war America. This two-man team, composed of Sam Clay (the American, and a writer) and Joe Kavalier (a Czech artist trained in magic and escape artistry) join forces to create a comic book character named The Escapist, who stands in the golden-age superhero company of the likes of Superman and Batman. This collaboration is the foundation for their joint stories, as the inexorable currents of their lives are filled with triumph and tragedy.
The novel's central theme is that of "escape." Throughout, all of the characters seek fervently to escape from various difficulties, some beyond their control and some of their own creation. To go any further into the nature of those escapes (successful and otherwise) would rob the story of much of its impact, so I will say nothing more specific. The writing has considerable emotional power, and that forcefulness is all-the-more-powerful without a clear picture of what lies on the horizon. The structure and the ending are unpredictable going forward, but makes perfect sense looking back, a rare combination.
However, Chabon's writing is excellent precisely because of its ability to give us a sense of the future. Like an excellent soundtrack, Chabon's ability to use foreshadowing gives us hints about events about to take place. Nothing in the book is truly surprising (in that the reader is shocked when it happens) because Chabon hints at each twist as it unfolds. The result is a narrative that flows in a way that is deeply intuitive, even as it is also realistically chaotic.
It's probably the case that a certain Nerd contingent will feel as though the book is written especially for them (and some of the obtuse references Chabon presents are undeniably nerdy), but being completely ignorant of the world of comic books and pulp writing should present no difficulty to a mainstream reader. The focus is on the characters and their inner worlds, which are vibrant in their humanity. While comic books are uniquely suited to the themes of the novel, this is a book anyone can enjoy immensely, and everyone should....more
On the surface, there's a lot to like about Pirate Sun, the third of Karl Schroeder's Virga books. Unlike the second book (Queen of Candesce), which sOn the surface, there's a lot to like about Pirate Sun, the third of Karl Schroeder's Virga books. Unlike the second book (Queen of Candesce), which seemed to progress orthogonally from the plot of the first book (Sun of Suns), this new installment picks up loose ends established early in the series and resolves many of the driving conflicts that were established from that onset. However, upon closer examination, Pirate Sun begins to have the musty aroma of a formula.
The Virga books are well-described as "high adventure driven by hard-nosed science fiction." In this regard, the world in which the story takes place remains interesting and compelling. As in previous volumes, Schroeder keep throwing new twists into the setting, expanding on the foundation of reasonable science to catch the reader off guard and reveal the quirks of his distinctive world. Unfortunately, the number of "aha!" moments inevitably diminishes with each book (as the setting is further fleshed out), and soon the "high adventure" element of the narrative must support itself under its own weight.
In this important regard, Pirate Sun begins to sag a little. Schroeder's characters remain archetypal, to the point of being cliched, and unless they are able to surprise the reader, the excitement of the writing increasingly depends on getting the next "fix" of setting weirdness. To make matters worse, Virga's two most compelling prior characters (Hayden and Venera) are largely absent and the new protagonists are conflicted in such simple ways that they do not propel the story forward with the same kind of urgency.
This is not to say Pirate Sun is bad, by any means. Many of the underlying concepts are sophisticated, highly strange, well worth serious thought. These are merely set dressing, however, for what is quite obviously popcorn fiction: not too filling, not too nutritious, but easy to eat and superficially (if predictably) tasty. Schroeder more cleverly concealed this superficiality in his earlier Virga books, but is less successful in this case. Without either an infusion of striking new ideas (the first book's strength), or a deepening and complexifying of the protagonists (the second book's strength), the Virga books may have officially gone into decline with this volume....more
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