Wow, just wow, what a fucking amazing writer Rick Moody is, even Jesus would be hard-presed to write a better story than this; that's what I thought after reading the first thing I ever read that Rick Moody wrote, the short story "The Preliminary Notes," that kicks off this collection. It's about this guy who's a kind of investigative risk assessor who hires himself out as an expert witness to lawyers looking to sue on behalf of injured clients. In this case, it's a woman who slipped and fell in a New Jersey Caldor's.
Anyway, this guy, let's call him "Bert," because
I don't think he's given a name in the story, at least
I dont recall it and I can't find it now flipping back through the pages. Anyway, Bert starts taping his wife's phone calls & discovers
she's having an affair. What's worse, he comes to realize how she sees him, which is none too flattering. Turns out, other people aren't just Hell, they're also Dorian Gray's mirror.
Bert's wife is both.
Bert's wife is both.
Bert's marriage is falling apart, he's cracking up, his son
is having a birthday & maybe worst
of all, he's living in New Jersey.
I had a less starry-eyed celestial view of the next story, however. The next story made me realize that Rick Moody is just mortal, after all. Jesus definitely could have written a better story than
"The Grid, " even in long hand, even with
the pierced palms,
even without a laptop.
even without a laptop.
"The Grid" is kind of a tedious exercise taking the conceit of a first kiss between two people & expanding the event outward, like ripples on a pond, to show how it affects & relates to other people at greater and greater distances from each other, connecting even apparent strangers. There were a lot of movies at one point using this device. It's likely that's when this story was first written. Think Six Degrees of Separation with a kiss. What if you could chart an entire city based on the first kisses of its inhabitants?
What if?
So what?
You could probably chart & connect an entire city's inhabitants based on a lot of random things, like when they flushed the toilet for the first time
that day.
"The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner" on the other hand is a most excellent story. It takes the form of a college term paper written by the aforementioned Bob. He uses the Book of Revelation as a commentary on his own sad, pitiful life. Or maybe it's vice-versa. Or maybe his story is a concordance to the Book of Revelation. Well, it's something. And this story is something else. I liked it. No, I loved it. I craved more of it than the 30-odd pages there was of it.
Plus, I've never been to Michigan.
"Pip Adrift" was tedious.
That was about the black cabin boy in Moby-Dick.
I guess Moody's story was an
exercise in postmodern Deleuzian textual reconstruction after the Derridean deconstruction .
Pip was Ahab's cabin boy.
He fell overboard, went nuts bobbing along
on the open sea, until he was fished out.
Giving voice
to the suppressed & repressed, I guess that's what Moody is doing here. In this case, he's giving voice to one of those who remained voiceless and objectified when Melville
originally wrote the novel.
The arrival of the repressed.
The arrival of the repressed.
Telling the story
that wasn't told back in 1851.
Or whenever.
Whatever.
I didn't like the story.
It wasn't worth waiting 164 years for in my opinion.
If written at all, it probably should have been written by a black person. Now it was a story featuring a suppressed voice ventriloquized by yet another white writer.
Boo.
Bah.
If written at all, it probably should have been written by a black person. Now it was a story featuring a suppressed voice ventriloquized by yet another white writer.
Boo.
Bah.
I found my attention adrift
along with Pip.
along with Pip.
And my patience.
And a lot of other things.
Alas.
Ahoy.
Drifting away.
Peg-leg.
By the way, the views expressed by the writer of this
review are not necessarily my own. Why do they have
to be? Why can't criticism be written in the same spirit
as a piece of fiction, especially when it's critiquing a piece
of fiction? Rhetoric has a momentum of its own,
just like a novel or short story, just like a poem.
Characters get away from fiction writers all the time.
Poets become inspired by their "muse."
Why can't the same happen to someone writing a
book review? There's no reason it can't!
"The novel wrote itself," a writer says proudly,
as if something magical has happened, as if the fact
that the writer lost conscious control of his or her
story authenticates the writing more than any other.
Well, this piece of criticism wrote itself. I had no
control over it. I am large. I contain multitudes.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds.
Etc.
I meant to go in one direction with this review
and the damn thing went off on its own!
The critic is a stance, a point-of-view, a character
with its own consistency, but limited as the
writer of criticism is not.
How do you
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds.
Etc.
I meant to go in one direction with this review
and the damn thing went off on its own!
The critic is a stance, a point-of-view, a character
with its own consistency, but limited as the
writer of criticism is not.
How do you
like that?
"A Good Story" is a good story about a man who returns home to supervise the euthanasia of a family horse. He comes from the kind of family that lives on a horse farm. That has horses.
Egads. Sorry, I can't really relate. My family's high point was the acquisition of a mildly used Bonneville Pontiac. It was all downhill from there.
Egads. Sorry, I can't really relate. My family's high point was the acquisition of a mildly used Bonneville Pontiac. It was all downhill from there.
Still, it was a good story
just as the title advertises.
just as the title advertises.
Poignant & stuff.
It contains this memorable line: "The unavoidable definition of adulthood: that time of life in which you take care of things because no one else can."
"A Good Story" is also a story about stories because our lives as we
recall them, well, what are they anyway but stories?
I hated "Treatment," which took the form of a film treatment narrated in one long breathless sentence that ran on for 794 pages (time being relative, it felt like that many pages. Perhaps it was only ten), retelling a first-date with a legendary East Village bohemian poet—or something like that; it nearly made me give up on the book. It was that wearisome.
And my nose was running.
I was suffering from a cold.
I was miserable.
I was slouched down on an unfamiliar
part of the couch.
The cat had stolen my usual spot
& I didn't have the heart to wake her.
I'm that sort of person.
& I didn't have the heart to wake her.
I'm that sort of person.
But I perserved. I read "The James Dean Garage Band"
in which James Dean doesn't die when we think he did
but stumbles off from the scene of the accident
into the desert & comes upon these four
dudes in a fallout shelter playing awful music.
J.D., hiding out from celebrity,
teaches them how to play
like celebrities but just as they are about to make
their big breakthrough…
yep, stuff happens, nothing comes of it,
& that's why you've never heard of them even
if they did invent all the music you've ever heard.
& that's why you've never heard of them even
if they did invent all the music you've ever heard.
Dean disappears and we're left with the
best sentence in the whole book:
"If the life you lead is not the one you dreamed about,
then flee."
Worth the price of admission is that one line.
Especially if you bought the book for $1.50 at
Turn the Page…Again, a used bookstore in
Bayside, Queens, like I did.
It's staffed by people who are recovering from mental breakdowns, who are trying to get back into the workforce.
This information is posted on their website.
They aren't making any secret of it.
"How do you get your feet so soft?" says the woman working there.
"I just use lotion," says a second woman working there. She's about to leave for the day, her shift over.
"Lotion? That's all?"
"Yep."
"You're going to have guys wanting to kiss those feet."
She says this twice. Then a
third time.
Like maybe she wants to kiss those feet.
"Remind me, I'll tell you about this friend of mine who takes the train in to the city" says the woman with the soft feet heading to the door. "Every day this guy at the train station asked her
to let him kiss her feet. Then one day, he did."
She laughs.
Then the other woman laughs.
Then the woman with the soft feet leaves the store and the other woman repeats several times to herself, "Kissed her feet. Kissed her feet."
There were times in my life when trying to put myself back together or trying to hold myself together, I could have used a place like this to work. I would have been right at home working here. No book more than five dollars, most less than that,
and some even free of charge altogether.
"Twister" is a very short story, just a few pages, in which a son tells this very detailed account of having witnessed a spontaneous mini-tornado at his school. The fact is, though, that he wasn't there at all. He's retelling the story second-hand, as if he were an eyewitness. Why?
He wants his dad's attention, of course.
But there's more to it than that. Throughout his life he repeats the story to other people, each time as an eyewitness account, pretending to have been there when he wasn't.
You could spend a lot of time unpacking the possible
meanings of this well-packed little handbag of a story
but this isn't the time or place for it.
The title story is the longest in the book, a novella really, winner of some kind of prize from the Paris Review & extraordinarily well-written, paced, & presented, no one can reasonably argue that, I don't think.
It's staffed by people who are recovering from mental breakdowns, who are trying to get back into the workforce.
This information is posted on their website.
They aren't making any secret of it.
"How do you get your feet so soft?" says the woman working there.
"I just use lotion," says a second woman working there. She's about to leave for the day, her shift over.
"Lotion? That's all?"
"Yep."
"You're going to have guys wanting to kiss those feet."
She says this twice. Then a
third time.
Like maybe she wants to kiss those feet.
"Remind me, I'll tell you about this friend of mine who takes the train in to the city" says the woman with the soft feet heading to the door. "Every day this guy at the train station asked her
to let him kiss her feet. Then one day, he did."
She laughs.
Then the other woman laughs.
Then the woman with the soft feet leaves the store and the other woman repeats several times to herself, "Kissed her feet. Kissed her feet."
There were times in my life when trying to put myself back together or trying to hold myself together, I could have used a place like this to work. I would have been right at home working here. No book more than five dollars, most less than that,
and some even free of charge altogether.
"Twister" is a very short story, just a few pages, in which a son tells this very detailed account of having witnessed a spontaneous mini-tornado at his school. The fact is, though, that he wasn't there at all. He's retelling the story second-hand, as if he were an eyewitness. Why?
He wants his dad's attention, of course.
But there's more to it than that. Throughout his life he repeats the story to other people, each time as an eyewitness account, pretending to have been there when he wasn't.
You could spend a lot of time unpacking the possible
meanings of this well-packed little handbag of a story
but this isn't the time or place for it.
The title story is the longest in the book, a novella really, winner of some kind of prize from the Paris Review & extraordinarily well-written, paced, & presented, no one can reasonably argue that, I don't think.
It's basically a long meditation-in-fiction about drug addiction & sexual kink in late 80s/early 90s Manhattan. For a novella with a lot of nipple clamps, dildos, & slave harnesses, its pretty boring. I kept looking to the end to see how many pages there were still to read.
Literary porn is never hot enough to actually get me off, it's always one tit short of true titillation & no matter how insightful it is…well, somehow the sex always comes off seeming like a cheap ploy to attract attention to revelations that, upon a little reflection, aren't so brilliant, or revelatory after all.
"The Ring of Brightest Angels" is told in three parts by three different denizens of Manhattan's sex and drug underworld. Their stories are related by a narrator who admits that they were told to him. He's not a participant in any of these sordid adventures. He's just the messenger.
And the stories he tells unfortunately reflect a kind of above-it-all, objective moralism that I'm fairly sure Moody didn't intend.
Maybe he took a lot of drugs back then.
Maybe he went to the bondage clubs and shooting galleries and video peep booths he describes.
Maybe not, maybe it's all fiction.
But what does Rick Moody have to tell me about lesbian love triangles?
What does he have to say about the physical and psychological reality of being a transsexual?
What does he add to our real understanding of masochism as embodied by the guys he describes getting getting flogged and fisted by strangers in the dungeons of basement sex clubs?
Not much, except a passing voyeuristic interest that one can get from countless other writers who represent the dominant paradigm. In many respects, "The Ring of Brightest Angels" has a plasticity about it, like a grandmother's shrink-wrapped couch, protection against unseemly spills. It's kinky sex tourism for the curious.
It's the view from the bus window, the bus plastered with advertisements for hit Broadway musicals.
I want to say:
Dear Rick Moody,
Leave the lesbianism to the dykes.
Leave the gender-bending stuff to those who've walked that walk and undergone the surgeries and the hormone treatments.
I know it's fiction and you're free to imagine what it's like to be Hispanic or a woman or a woman who used to be a man or gay or whoever and whatever but don't you see that's part of the problem? That while the imagination is a wonderful thing, that it can stretch us outside of our usual confines, it can also be a deadly thing, a weapon of oppression? That what you're merely imagining from your place of privilege and power and unintended condescension is silencing the truly other voiced and canceling out the authentic outsider experience of the very real if invisible people you're writing about, supposedly—hopefully—even in the best case scenario, out of a sense of sympathy and empathy.
You're putting words in mouths, Rick Moody, and suffocating the unheard, you're strangling them, & helping ensure that they are never heard in their own voice. What's heard instead is you, Rick Moody. You with your imagination. You're repeating a lot of stereotypes and perpetuating an equal amount of ignorance regarding the real experience and emotions of people you aren't and never will be. You're doing this unintentionally, Rick Moody, with the best and purest intentions, I would bet, but I hasten to remind you that people have burned other people at stakes and stoned them with stones in circles of righteousness with the best of intentions too. Good intentions don't make the flames any less hot or the stones any softer for those you martyr with your kindness.
And the bulldog!
Don't forget the freaking bulldog!
Good intentions don't feed him.
And he's awful hungry.
And the bulldog!
Don't forget the freaking bulldog!
Good intentions don't feed him.
And he's awful hungry.
Go back across whatever river your crossed and report on the New Jersey suburbs and what life is like growing up, marrying, and dying there. Go describe that kind of despair. That's what you're best at. What you were born to do. Don't try to walk a mile in my high-heels. Your attempts are awkward, distorting, and ultimately grotesque and dispiriting and insulting. What you tell me it feels like?
It doesn't!
It doesn't!
Sincerely and with much admiration for your work in general,
Meeah Williams
Why am I getting my panties in a bunch about this?
Why am I carrying on so?
What am I bothering to write a review of this book at all?
What does Rick Moody care?
What does anyone care?
Why am I asking myself rhetorical questions,
even in a rhetorical piece of writing?
It's a stupid device.
At least I'm not addressing myself by my own name.
That's vanity, akin to insanity.
Finally, the final piece in this collection, "Primary Sources," is a kind of "about the author" told in the form of footnotes to a bibliography…or, as Moody writes, a list of some of the books he has lying around the house. This is the kind of postmodern
experiment I can wholeheartedly accept—it's honest, it's clever, & it doesn't presume to speak for any minority but the one represented by the author, who, let us never forget, is always no more than any one of us:
the voice of one lonely person
calling out into oblivion
perhaps, by chance,
to be heard by someone
(else).
Yeah. Good luck with that.
That's vanity, akin to insanity.
Finally, the final piece in this collection, "Primary Sources," is a kind of "about the author" told in the form of footnotes to a bibliography…or, as Moody writes, a list of some of the books he has lying around the house. This is the kind of postmodern
experiment I can wholeheartedly accept—it's honest, it's clever, & it doesn't presume to speak for any minority but the one represented by the author, who, let us never forget, is always no more than any one of us:
the voice of one lonely person
calling out into oblivion
perhaps, by chance,
to be heard by someone
(else).
Yeah. Good luck with that.
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