Dear Friends,
I’m sharing discussions of new-ish books - one fiction, one non-fiction. These are focused less on plot summary and up/down verdicts and more on the book’s underlying themes.
Best,
Sam
HERVE LE TELLIER’s The Anomaly (2020)
Mixed feelings on this. I guess I’m thrilled that it’s sold the millions of copies that it has - that says a certain amount about the capabilities of the reading public, that it can enjoy the game Le Tellier is playing, which is to pretend to be writing a Tom Clancy book about contract killers and secret government protocols but in fact to be writing a philosophical treatise with a a lit theory kind of solution. That puts The Anomaly in the camp of Sophie’s World or The Name of the Rose, bookish adventure stories that come along once in a great while and captivate everyone.
In spite of appearing to be dealing with the greatest questions of all – and there’s a moment, around p.150 where it feels as if the anomaly might crack the whole code of existence or something – it’s actually pursuing fairly minor game. The thesis, basically, is, as Tina Brewster-Wang puts it, that “scientists shouldn’t be the only people woken up in the middle of the night.” Crises of real magnitude call for philosophers; and the true head-scratchers demand, of course, literary theory. As the characters within The Anomaly eventually intuit, the puzzle isn’t really to be solved in debates about the simulation or glitches in the matrix. It’s about art – and, specifically, the novel that strikes Victor Miesel as his plane, on March 10th, hits a patch of turbulence. The key to the whole structure of The Anomaly is the Lego brick that Miesel keeps as a pet superstition but that he has replaced several times over the decades, a memory of a memory, a link to a lost, happy past. As Miesel concludes the anomaly, just before his suicide, “I am not putting an end to my existence but giving life to immortality.” In other words, art is the solution to the riddle – creativity proliferates and woe to the head of state who gets sick of it and tries to stop it. The simplicity of this lesson accounts for the easy-going, good-humored press conferences that Victor June conducts at the novel’s end. The point he’s making is obvious enough – and the novel slows down, enjoys itself, as he’s making them. At a more fraught level – and this may be the real heart of The Anomaly – Le Tellier is dealing with the lessons from and meaning of oulipo. He name-checks this in fairly transparent ways – as in Miesel’s meditation on “why he always walks in Perec’s shadow.” That rumination seems to be intended self-deprecatingly - The Anomaly can come across as a mass-market facsimile of Life: A User’s Manual, complete with the large cast of characters all tangentially connected to one another; the narrative technique of moving laterally through an enclosed space (an apartment building in Perec’s case, an airplane cabin in Le Tellier’s) and creating a pleasing structure that’s both discursive and palimpsestic; the various threads constantly interweaving with one another. And what The Anomaly represents, really, is a kind of proof of concept of oulipo. If oulipo is best known for its absurdic formal restraints – Perec, in the most famous instance, writing an entire novel without using the letter e; and has its connotations as being permanently avant garde and inaccessible – Le Tellier demonstrates that the restraints needn’t be so forbidding. It’s possible for the restraint to be the tropes of a classic thriller – hit men, secret government protocols, etc – and for that to then create an internal free space, as in the oulipo model, in which to play around and meditate on the meaning of everything.
The issue I have with The Anomaly is that it seems to have little else to offer once it demonstrates the proof of concept. Le Tellier makes his point nicely – oulipo is redeeemed by the market! it is possible to create a cross-genre between thrillers and philosophy – but I have the sense that, beyond that, he isn’t particularly interested in his material. Each set of doubles from the plane is like a narrative puzzle that he needs to solve as efficiently as possible. The Blake story swiftly disposes of a variety of metaphysical riddles. The Andre story turns out to be about a sort of a middle-aged resignation. The David story reinforces the anguish of loss. It turns out – as LeTellier is often himself aware – that there is not really a lot of juice in the narrative. The first 150 pages feel schematic and expository, livened by Le Tellier’s urbane style (“he’s had so little contact with Tina Wang that he didn’t know a Brewster had come into her life”) but in need of narrative payoff. That payoff arrives on schedule - on p.151, is satisfying and absorbing and, as Le Tellier notes, plunges the world into a “moral vacuum.” But Le Tellier isn’t actually any more interested in Derek Parfit-esque questions about identity in simulation type realities than he is in the Tom Clancy-ish plot points about inter-state responses to unaccounted-for contingencies. He is interested in the Lego brick in Miesel’s pockets and, once that point is spelled out, the narrative heads into a self-congratulatory and half-heartedly apocalyptic zone, which is pretty nakedly all about life on the bestseller list and the joys of the talk show circuit.
Le Tellier, with some padding to do, has a pleasant-enough satire of – in round-robin fashion – scientists, politicians, and religious leaders. Every one of these is amusing – the politicians’ satire the most ad hominem and probably the funniest – but, in sum, reveal the shortcomings of LeTellier’s structure. In combining two genres – the thriller and the philosophical treatise – that both treat characters as stock figures, LeTellier more or less forgoes the possibility of creating psychological depth and, in a pinch, defaults to light satire. But the satire seems, slightly, a wrong choice. The more interesting possibilities that Le Tellier raised are exactly in fictional Parfit-ism what are the psychological implications of the simulation? of fractured timelines? Le Tellier may have felt that these topics had already been covered in nerdier depth in sci-fi, but I do regret that he didn’t dive further into the discussion of copies. I’ve been thinking about this recently – the idea that the essence of our era (speaking in a very broad sense) is copies, commodities, the dissemination of existing materials. 3-D printing makes that new reality even more apparent, and cloning is only a small step from there. The real point of The Anomaly – very much part of the novel’s texture although I wish it had been more foregrounded – is the discussion of how our society would react if we all really were presented with copies of ourselves, if individual identity was understood, finally, to be a sham. Le Tellier’s conclusion – reasonable enough – is that we would greet it with suave indifference.
PAUL AUSTER’s Bloodbath Nation (2023)
I’ve never really gotten what the big deal is with Paul Auster - is it really just that he looks so much like a writer? – and Bloodbath Nation, slim and, har-har, bloodless, is no help at all in figuring that out.
The book is two anecdotes – there’s the story of Auster discovering that his grandfather was shot to death by his grandmother (a family secret buried for decades); and then the truly unnerving story of Auster, in a youthful stint in the Merchant Marine, befriending a sailor, Lamar, and then being told that Lamar’s hobby was to wander to the highway overpass of his Texas town and to take potshots at passing cars.
Both, of course, are powerful, evocative stories. Neither of them lead anywhere. The rest of the book is a Brookings-lite attempt by Auster to assign some sort of sociological culpability to the mass-shooting epidemic – and looking in all the most obvious, most familiar places.
If there’s a takeaway for me from Bloodbath Nation, it’s just an annoyance with the way writers are exploring this topic (I’ve written about this in a post on a far-more-wrong-headed essay by Sam Kriss) and a conviction that this, simply, is a subject that nobody can say anything intelligent about, that surpasseth understanding.
There is a distinction to be made – which Auster often seems to elide over – between gun violence and mass shootings. The understanding is that gun violence is a predominantly American problem – that we have too many guns, a culture of gun violence, etc – but that the problem could be dealt with, in theory, by reasonable gun control legislation (and it’s understood that that problem is not exactly unique to America – that other countries do have problems with violence by guns not to mention violence by other weapons). And then there is the problem of mass shootings, which is what we really are talking about – and that’s a problem from some demon dimension, a portal to hell that opened up particularly in America and that we seem to be completely incapable of closing again.
And much of the quieter social discourse of my lifetime is a kind of journeying from domain to domain seeing if anybody has anything to offer on the mass shooting epidemic. The first impulse after Columbine – which is where my horizon on this really starts – was pop psychology, a Bettelheimian blaming of the parents or else a Nancy Reagan-esque fixation on the toxicity of teen culture. There was a Camus-ian direction, which was to see the mass shooter as a manifestation of a deeper nihilism; a bankrupt society turning on itself. There was a material culture school that blamed video games almost as much as guns themselves. Maybe most noxiously of all, there was a literary direction that attempted (I’m thinking of what I objected to in Kriss) to see the mass shooter as an only somewhat extreme version of familiar alienation and familiar growing pains.
Every one of these was deeply unsatisfying. Auster, somewhere in Bloodbath Nation, visits the majority of these before settling on the least compelling explanation of all - that it’s an American phenomenon, an extension of some particular national neurosis; and that, by that token, the only viable suspect would be racism, the legacy of slavery.
That it’s an American phenomenon, Auster takes pretty much for granted. “These grisly spectacles have occurred often enough in the past two decades to qualify as a new form of American ritual,” he majestically writes. He observes, correctly, that guns were foundational to the country’s settlement – a more intrinsic part of the national psyche than for just about any other nation. And he pins the gun, as murder weapon, on the nation’s defining crimes – the ‘clearing of the frontier’; the slave patrols that hunted runaway slaves. And, in the most original argument in Bloodbath Nation, he finds a modern corollary to the original sin – which is to see the modern growth of the NRA and the unhinged spread of guns as a direct reaction to the Black Panthers. “It is almost certain that the gun rights movement as it exists today would not have been born without the Black Panthers,” he writes. The idea being that in the late ‘60s the NRA switched its focus from a protection of ‘sportsmen’ to a rhetoric of militant self-defense, which was, in so many words, racism; and that that turn really was the opening of the demon dimension, the guns passing to the angriest, most unhinged members of the society.
Assuming that mass shooting is a peculiarly American phenomenon, Auster’s is as good an explanation as any, but I just don’t really believe that it’s unique to America. Suicide bombing isn’t really so different, and there are mass shootings in parts of the world that have no legacy of Western Settlement or Trans-Atlantic Slavery. If I had to choose one model for understanding the mass shooting phenomenon, it would be epidemiology – the theory of contagion. ‘Copycatting’ has clearly been central to the mass shootings – everybody has known, from the beginning, that once there was a shooting in a high school or on a college campus, that there would then be others, that the crazies, in their isolation, were responsive to one another (and this was before 4Chan, Parler, etc, conversations made that development explicit). I had a moment of recognition in reading a New Yorker article on suicide and an Atlantic article on MH370. In the case of suicide, the consensus had evolved from thinking about suicide in psychological or quasi-mystical terms – as an extension of a person’s fate, some inalienable death drive – to seeing suicide as highly-contingent and socially-driven. In the case of MH370, the point was that it was actually somewhat clear what had happened – the plane’s captain had ‘run amok,’ a condition with a long history in Malaysia and fairly unknown in the Western world, in which a person goes into a deep, almost catatonic state and then suddenly explodes in determined and irresistible violence. In the classic case, ‘running amok’ occurs with a sword; in the case of MH370, it was at 40,000 feet. The lesson was that these sorts of extreme behaviors were contagious and passed through a culture like a virus. In the instance of suicide, that was actually good news – it meant that fairly simple expedients (railings on bridges; hotlines) could help to arrest a suicide epidemic; just as effective gun control could presumably end the epidemic of mass shooting. In the instance of ‘running amok,’ the dangerous behavior was understood in cultural terms (it happened to be prevalent in Malaysia) but not as an extension of a national character. In theory, the phenomenon could drift, as a contagion, into a different culture, just as, per The New Yorker article, a suicide epidemic could easily hit Micronesia, which previously had never known suicide; and just as American-style mass shooting events could suddenly occur in Scotland or Norway.
But ‘epidemiology’ and ‘contagion’ are just my preferred metaphor for thinking about mass shootings (as Auster’s is national character). The more important point is their essential unknowability – and, maybe even more crucially, our willingness to recognize that we will never know, that the events themselves constitute a sort of forbidden knowledge. Auster puts this vividly in Bloodbath Nation. Describing Lamar, the psychopathic merchant mariner, he writes, “When the maniac appears to be an ordinary level-headed fellow with no chip on his shoulder or apparent grudge against the world, what are we to think and how are we supposed to act?” What Lamar was up to preceded video games, Marilyn Manson, even late 20th century anomie. His psychopathy seems basically to have been boredom – and a warped soul. I think Auster is absolutely right to say that “no one has ever provided a satisfactory answer to this question” – for the good reason that no satisfactory answer can exist; and Auster, notwithstanding his eloquence and acuity, isn’t even close to providing a satisfactory explanation for Lamar.
If there is an explanation it probably comes from the shooters themselves. Auster excerpts a passage from Christopher Harper-Mercer’s manifesto saying, “I now serve the demonic hierarchy. When I die I will become one of them. A demon. My success in hell is assured.” My sense is that we should take Harper-Mercer at his word. As he put it, he entered into contact with demonic entities. And that means that we shouldn’t particularly try to follow; shouldn’t explain, shouldn’t understand.
I’m pleased that I brought up the tangential topic of MH370 because within it is the metaphor of the ‘black box.’ The hope has been that the black box – dredged up from the ocean floor in one of the most remote parts of the world – would yield the ultimate truth of what happened on the flight, but the name itself suggests a grimmer sensibility. A ‘black box’ is what you do not want to know; do not want to open. In our culture we have lost touch with the idea of ‘forbidden knowledge,’ of ‘veils of understanding’ – which we should restore. There are truths that we are best not knowing.
Well put. I add that the sheer numbers of our funny release of spearmint bullets I strongly believe would have been equalled during the original Crack epidemic if police had not exerted their union strength to search every car for weapons until the NRA which is to say one half of the country reasoned that their guns were next. On 5hisvepisode of your beautiful blague, I think we are on the precipice of believing the Oath. Keepers will get the West World that generations of sextards like myself been working towards. Fourth of July alldays. Publicans were the last holdouts and the fact that they have not asked you for money to support yheir cause means they joined the Romans . Is politics violence by polite means. None of this makes a lick of sense.
Who will speak on behalf of Ted Kosinczi who already clearly articulate some genius case for anarch o platonism or some aristocratic new species of loose association like the education of Emile for grown adults with cameras running. He did. This necessitates popular policing but it is a dirty job and noooobody except Jack booted thuggees want to party.