If the comic potential of the Central Intelligence Agency has only recently been tapped, and then mostly for wry satires, such as Burn After Reading, that present the agency as a plodding bureaucracy, the agency has long furnished Hollywood with a narrative matrix for action movies; one might argue that that is its only remaining effective function. That may have provided all the reassurance that the greenlighters needed when asked to approve This Means War, a romantic comedy involving blood-brother agents who like to kick, punch, and shoot at least as much as they care to fondle. Falling into a rivalry for the love of one woman, they turn the full range of their professional resources against one another in the pursuit of love.  

Being gentlemen, at least nominally, the agents decline to kick, punch and shoot at one another until the very end, when they finally indulge in one of their scene-clearing brawls. We know about these fights because the movie opens with one, and a subsidiary revenge plot that targets the agents keeps violence on the boil throughout the proceedings. I would like to say that Tom Hardy is a lot more convincing than Chris Pine at using his head rather than his fists in the pursuit of love, but I think I’m biased; I really like Tom Hardy. But I’m not sure that he has any more business in a comedy than Mr Pine does. With his eyes welling up with bruised affection, Mr Hardy is another kind of hero, and This Means War gives him the opportunity to play his long suit, in a subplot involving his son and ex-wife. Aha! Son and ex-wife! It’s a credit to the filmmakers, headed by a director called, simply, McG (boys! he’s Joseph McGinty Nichol, from Kalamazoo), that the one agent’s prior meaningful relationships do not forewarn us that the other’s lack of them has marked him for victory with Lauren, the lady in question, played gamely by Reese Witherspoon. That may be because the romantic aspect of the film is taken up largely by Lauren’s inability to decide between two so evenly-matched specimens of manly hunkitude. Her confidant is a married woman played by an actress who seems to be running an independent comic shtick, in the venerable tradition of Eve Arden. This friend has a foul mouth and spouts bad advice. She is the last person in the world that Lauren would plausibly listen to, but this departure from likelihood matches the handling of the CIA, whose acronym in this movie might as well stand for “Cartoon Intelligence Agency.”

Aside from the fisticuffs, which are so fast and furious that my eyes couldn’t follow the action, This Means War is so neatly made that, language aside, it could have starred Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Sneer not: Angela Bassett and Rosemary Harris have pungent if lean supporting roles. There are some very funny moments, especially when each of the lovers has to sit through a critique of his charms that has been surreptitiously recorded by the other. This amusing twist on the focus group is all the more piquant because Lauren is an analyst of consumer products who knows her onions as well as her suitors know theirs. At the climax, when the bad guy is about to mow down the romantic trio with a bulletproofed SUV, Lauren calls out to the boys to shoot out the headlights, because on all late models of this particular vehicle, a broken headlight triggers the airbags. This information not only saves our friends but puts an end to the villain’s life of crime. When the smoke clears, Lauren proclaims her choice with an embrace, and Tuck (Mr Hardy), revealed by TV news coverage of the climactic mayhem to be something other than a travel agent, is reunited with his ex-wife and son.

So that’s Chelsea Handler!

***

Halfway through The Starboard Sea, the story picks up momentum and the writing becomes less displeasing, but I’ve found at least two misplaced modifiers, and one of them is delicious. It contains it own little time machine. Because the sentence can be construed as grammatically correct when it’s read out of context, I’ll have to set the scene.

     The girls had a two-bedroom suite with a view of the Public Gardens. Though the hotel wouldn’t serve us alcohol in the restaurant, they were happy to send liquor up to the room. First we raided the minibar. Then we ordered a stash of top-shelf liquor.
      Within minutes of being in the suite, teams of crew jocks began flooding the room.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers to hear that I have never experienced what used to be called “writer’s block.” I say “used to” because it occurs to me that you never hear the phrase anymore. Perhaps it has taken the place of homosexuality as the secret that dare not breathe its name, a shocking personal defect that must never be confessed. However oppressive to sufferers of writer’s block, such a silence would atone for the attention that whining impotent writers used to claim. What’s really surprising is how sorry everyone else felt for blocked writers. Wasn’t there anything that could be done? Yes, it turned out that there was. In fact, there are at least two cures.  

The simpler cure is to acknowledge that you are not a writer, or at least not a writer capable of compassing the thoughts that beguile you. If you are not a writer, then you must find something else to do. If you’re reaching beyond your grasp, then you must find something else within it, and get to work on that. 

It is simpler still to acknowledge that you are a lazy, vain bum. Laziness and vanity, the gentle vices, are opposite sides of the same coin, and both reflect the absence of an active interest in life. The bum who complains of writer’s block expects his book to come to him in the form of “inspiration.” This strange idea is not entirely the bum’s fault. Ancient writers used to justify their work by claiming divine inspiration. God or a muse directed the course of every sentence, the writer doing little more than taking dictation. It’s easy to see why this theory of artistry would appeal to lazy, vain bums.

There are cases that look like writer’s block but aren’t. There’s Wagneritis, for example. This is what you’ve got when you keep realizing that you must go back to the real beginning of your story. If you are Wagner, you know when to stop. Wagner did not go back to the real beginning of his Ring story. He began at from which there were still plenty of backstories to be narrated. He was shrewd enough to distinguish the beginning of his story from the beginning of his drama. Wagner did write gorgeous music, but I do think sometimes that what made him a genius for the ages was his triumph over crippling megalomania. You can’t say that Wagner didn’t get things done.

Then there are the centipedes who have been paralysed by thinking about what they’re doing. Philosophy is not a healthy undertaking generally, but it is particularly injurious to creative writers. Some victims never recover; others, more’s the pity, stuff their philosophizing into their work, where the rest of us have to slog through it.

No, my problem was never writer’s block.

***

As noted over the weekend, I listened to Siegfried on Saturday. I haven’t listened to Wagner much in the past couple of years. Every now and then, Tristan or Die Meistersinger, rarely getting all the way through either, not because of flagging interest but because I had to go do something else before the music was over. I had the feeling that listening to Wagner was an indulgence, perhaps even a guilty pleasure. Beneath the glittering, sumptuous surface, after all, what you’ve got is unwholesome chunks of Schopenhauer. Considering his philosophy, you might think that Schopenhauer ought to have been a blocked writer: why, with such a world view, carry on at all? But carry on is what Schopenhauer miserably did. And as a result of his influence on Wagner, if we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, then what a gloriously upholstered handbasket it is!

Inclined more to duty than to volupté, I’d been listening a lot to Verdi. Verdi never had anything to do with mythology; every one of his operas has all of its feet planted firmly in the real world of human weakness. Verdi’s music contrives to make you feel things, not to imagine them. He rouses your sympathy for virtue and your thirst for justice. He doesn’t make you think about them. That’s, curiously, what Wagner’s swirling sonic orgies do: they make you think. Or at least to brood. Aside from the hero, the goddess who wakes up at the end, and the little forest bird who gives great directions, the figures in Siegfried are brooders, and their brooding is contagious.

Siegfried does as he pleases, but recklessness, while exhilarating, is never wise. The music, especially when no one is singing, is as free as the bird. These are the obviously lively aspects of the opera. But let’s consider the dragon, which is meant to be scary. Let’s register the spell of intense anxiety that opens the second act. Wagner presents these darker elements so richly that you sit back and become aware that you are having a good time. When the Wanderer (Wotan) and Mime play their game of questions, the stakes are cosmic, but cosmic with a mythologizing glimmer that releases you from the need to pay strict attention. If you ask me, Wagner actually encourages one’s mind to wander, and it’s when your mind wanders that the music grips while allowing you to continue wandering, and you slip into Wagner Time, and all of a sudden the whole thing is over.

***

I’ve just spent a half hour checking out reviews of Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn. I read the novel in two big swallows, staying up late one night to finish it. It was a delight to read, especially after Rose Macaulay’s nonpareil The Towers of Trebizond. But I’m reluctant to write about it, because there are too many little cracks in it that suggest trapdoors to other books — references, in other words, that I’m unable to identify. I’m especially puzzled by the children in the wood whose deadly game is just about the novel’s only moving part. Who are they? And why does the author think that he can just drop the murder of one of them? Is it a joke? Is it surreptitious clue, like a symbol in Umberto Eco? And how seriously are we supposed to take the title character’s dishonesty?

Coral Glynn’s readiness to temporize, prevaricate, and withhold might in a society such as ours today be taken as pathological, but Britain in 1950 was very unlike ours today, and a girl like Coral, without family or fortune, must make the most of every opportunity, even if that means wrapping up an employer’s sapphire ring and holding it until, ahem, somebody asks for it. The simple fact is that Cameron has dropped us into a world in which our moral compasses don’t work. We may be in the milieu described by his favorite novelists — Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, and Macaulay — but the permissions are altogether different. What Pym and Macaulay could only hint at, in such a way that sophisticate readers alone knew what they were talking about, Cameron is free to discuss as openly as he likes, and if continues to rely on suggestion and innuendo, it’s for the fun of it, not the necessity.

A writer who goes unmentioned in the reviews that I’ve seen, as well as on Cameron’s Web site, is Ivy Compton-Burnett. Perhaps it’s been a while since I’ve read Compton-Burnett, but I was reminded of her on every page of Coral Glynn that was set at Hart House. (John Donne lived at Hart Hall at Oxford — does that mean anything?) A charmless pile in the middle of nowhere, Leicestershire. “There were no other houses within sight, for the meadows often flooded, and the air was damp and considered bad.” One is grateful that books don’t cast off odors. The laconic housekeeper, Mrs Prence, is right out of Compton-Burnett, too. (Or have I encountered her before in Henry James? Come to think of it, are those children revenants from “The Turn of the Screw”?) There’s a dour quality to the characters that embodies the unmentioned bleakness of Britain’s postwar rationing, still in effect in 1950, and behind it is everything heavy and uninvitingly overupholstered that one associates with the Victorians. Coral Glynn is the opposite of nostalgic.

The plot of  Coral Glynn is simple to the point of absent-mindedness. Everything hangs on death. First, Mrs Hart dies. She’s the beastly old lady, afflicted with cancer, whom Coral Glynn, a visiting nurse, has been retained to care for. No sooner is she dead than her son, a middle-aged gent with a limp, asks Coral to marry him. She asks leave to think over his offer, and goes out for a walk. On the walk, she encounters a boy and a girl playing a nasty game. She tells them to stop, but does nothing else about it, and mentions what she has seen to no one. But it’s possible that she has been disturbed by what she has seen into accepting Major Hart’s offer. Why does Coral press for an early wedding? Is she afraid of interference by that former employer, whose ring she still possesses (but at a terrible cost)? Asked by a detective if she saw the children playing in the woods, Coral takes a new friend’s advice and denies it. This is, of course, a mistake. But the upshot is all very unexpected, very untrue to any known genre of fiction, even the absurd. The other shoe does not drop; rather, it evaporates. Meanwhile, Coral has a whole new life in London, and is last seen darting up to Yorkshire in what one imagines to be a sporty car, deeply in love with her second husband. It’s the friend who gave the advice who marries the Major.

Where does Coral get the nerve to insist upon inviting to her wedding luncheon not only the owner of a dress shop (with whom she has had words) but also the “pansy” from the florist’s who reminds her of her brother (killed in North Africa)? At first, the Major is willing to concede an invitation to the lady, even though she’s in trade, but he balks at the boy from the flower shop. Coral persists; it’s quite strange. Is she daft? It’s as though Fanny Price, first thing after marrying Edmund, refused to leave her chilly old quarters at Mansfield: some things just aren’t done. On a different level of composition, but just as strange, there are the occasional violations of the pitch-perfect prose, which would otherwise, at least to my New Yorker’s ears, pass for the real Brit. The only clinker that comes to mind without a search is “site-specific,” a turn of phrase that I can’t imagine anyone using in a non-military context in the middle of the last century.

“This isn’t a church wedding, Mrs Coppard,” said Coral, who worried that Dolly’s mother’s sentimentality might be site-specific.

The really odd thing about that “worry” is its suggestion that Coral wants Mrs Coppard to cry at her wedding — a desire that it’s difficult to attribute to her. Coral may be mysterious, but we know a few things about her, and one of them is a decided resserve. I don’t mean to suggest that Peter Cameron has written a high parody of Ivy Compton-Burnett, or of any other author, or even of any kind of novel. But he plays with the paints in the palettes of long-dead writers; he doesn’t copy them. “Site-specific” is clearly playful; there’s no way that a writer as painstaking (and fun-having) as Cameron could have committed a solecism of that kind.

In short, the book is, in the most amusing way imaginable, very queer. Even aside from the banked embers of Robin Lofting’s love for the Major, a boyhood passion that Clement Hart may or may not have requited, whatever the two of them did with their clothes off, long ago. It did not strike me that the Clement whom we meet in the novel was suppressing an ardor for physical contact with Robin, or any other homosexual urge; indeed, he seemed eager to marry Coral, on whatever restricted sexual terms, simply for the sake of her pretty company. So Coral Glynn is surely not a novel about a love that couldn’t be written about in 1950. It’s play once again. This sunny display of carefree virtuosity, juxtaposed against the dank gloom of a house too nondescript to describe, is the real mystery of Coral Glynn: how does Peter Cameron bring it off? One doesn’t want to enter the world that he has recreated, but one doesn’t want to stop reading about it, either.

These remarks of mine are, I suspect, more annoying than anything else. I’ve certaintly not set out to write a review. The minute I finished Coral Glynn, I was sure I had been floated across some very thin ice that would undoubtedly crack open if I attempted to report the experience. And how to register my enthusiasm? I’m happy to say that I enjoyed reading Coral Glynn, but it ought to be equally clear that I’m not eager to recommend it to anyone else. I know too many people who hate not being in on a joke. If there is a joke — and that, of course, is the joke of jokes. Peter Cameron is no stranger to experimental fiction, but he has also written Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, an amiable book so accessible that it was marketed, over his objections, as “Young Adult,” which is why so many readers came to it from their adolescent children. He is, in short, a past master. If he’s up to something, he doesn’t have to say. Having only just read the book once, I’m not going to hazzard any guesses.

 

Saturday

Now that personal blogging is all but dead, I feel easier about flouting its conventions and abusing its platform. But that doesn’t change what you might be thinking. You might be thinking that it’s still reasonable to expect a blog entry to be complete when it is published. As a general rule, anyway. You may not agree that the liveblogging format, which was developed to provide minute-by-minute coverage of thrilling television spectacles (Academy Awards, State of the Union) to readers who are also glued to their sets, works without an external anchor to cue the reader. If you’re not a fan of work in progress, then it’s probably best to hold off reading these Weekend Notes until Sunday night.

For my part, I find that it’s much more agreeable to have an open-ended entry that I can treat as a note pad, sitting down to write whenever struck by something worth writing about. What’s death to those evanescent moments is the mechanical business of opening a new entry &c, which, I being me, can never be a simple matter.  

***

So much for bright ideas. When Kathleen left to have her hair done, I put on Siegfried, which to me is the most exciting of the Ring operas. That sounds madly contrarian, I know, and it will strike some readers as pretentious. But it has been true ever since I discovered the Ring in college. Siegfried is also the most thoughtful opera of the cycle, which of course adds paradox to my position. But it’s the very drabness of the “story” that allows the compositional heft to upstage the mythology. Wagner weaves his motifs no more deftly here than he does in, certainly, Götterdämmerung, but you notice it more because the characters keep pointing to things that have happened. Sometimes, the music points forward to things that are going to happen, such as the beautiful musical support that Siegfried’s soon-to-be fatal narration elicits from the Gibichung men, foreshadowed as it were in the tranquil Waldvogel music that surrounds the death of Fafner in Act II of Siegfried. You hear it as a kind of hallucination; the men aren’t there, but you hear them. It’s extraordinarily exciting. And then there is the thrilling music that opens Act III, and the interlude that follows Siegfried up to Brünnhilde’s fire-ringed rock. And then Brünnhilde wakes up, and as long as a woman is singing the part, by which I mean to exclude the late Birgit Nilsson (all woman when she sings Verdi, but unsexed by Wagner), I’m crazy about the scene.

Inspired by Siegfried, I had a dozen good ideas for making the apartment a more livable place, and I implemented most of them. The only thought that crossed my mind without having a connection to housekeeping was to wonder if there might be a book out there by Helen Gardner, on the Metaphysical Poets. Alas, no. There’s only her Penguin edition of their poems. I used to have it somewhere; perhaps I still do. I couldn’t take the time to look for it.

And now dinner (chicken sauté) is about ready.

Sunday

After breakfast, while Kathleen was at Mass, I watched Bernard Tavernier’s 1981 Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate). I was determined to return the rented VHS tape to the Video Room on or before time, and I was also in the mood to sit around and do nothing. Oh, I washed the dishes and made the bed first; I wouldn’t have been able to pay attention to the movie otherwise. The tape quality was pretty awful, and I’m not sure whether this contributed to my being less than bowled over. (The Video Room has not acquired the Criterion Collection DVD.) The story is blackly amusing; a much put-upon policeman (Philippe Noiret) in a remote town realizes that, if he puts a little thought into it, he can get rid of the people who bully him every day, directly or indirectly, in such a way that the blame will fall on others. The scene in which his lover (Isabelle Huppert) shoots his wife (Stéphane Audran) and her “brother” (Eddy Mitchell) is particularly droll, so much so that Tavernier replays it twice (or so it seemed to me). But the setting, in French West Africa in 1938, was uncongenial (not that the Texas of Jim Harrison’s novel, Pop 1280, would have been nearly as appealing), and the manners were unremittingly French provincial. Coup de Torchon was screened at BAM last week, and Ms NOLA and a friend went to see it, finding much to discuss afterward. Perhaps that is what I needed: someone to talk about the movie with. I’m pretty sure that a clearer print would have helped.

I’m reading The Starboard Sea, a first novel by Amber Dermont, and not liking the writing very much. I bought the book almost rashly, on the strength of a favorable review in the Times this past week. (The book garnered a second warm welcome in this weekend’s Book Review.) Only writing on the level of Jennifer Egan or John Jeremiah Sullivan could have contended with the run of first-rate English fiction — what I mean to say is, “fiction written in first-rate English” — that I enjoyed in February (all of Edward St Aubyn, plus one each by Alan Hollingshurst and Rose Macaulay). The Starboard Sea seems to have a story worth reading, but the writing falls short in various ways, which I am cataloguing as I go along. I do not enjoy not enjoying writing, but I am not too saintly to sigh with satisfaction when I catch a writer doing something that explains why I’m not enjoying the writing.

***

A week ago Friday, Kathleen and I went to the Rose Theatre in TimeWarner Center to hear Dianne Reeves for the third time.  I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned this sooner, or said anything about the evening. Ms Reeves possesses a voice of instrumental distinction; Berlioz and Strauss would have had to create a chapter just for her in their treatise on orchestration. She is perhaps the most musical singer whom I’ve ever heard. This is grounds for caution, I discovered: the fact that Dianne Reeves could make beautiful music out of her grocery shopping list does not mean that she can fashion a beautiful song from such material, and her penchant for singing remarks about her songs that another singer would speak had at times the result of trivializing the import of the songs’ lyrics. Better to stick to vocalise, the spinning of wordless arias far beyond scat, that Ms Reeves gets better at every time we hear her. Indeed, one of her best numbers, which I entitled “Barcelona” simply because I didn’t know what else to call her incredibly powerful and expressive response to watching a Spanish singer on television, was set to words in no known language and every one.

My other quibble was with a song that I subsequently learned is the work of Ani DiFranco. It is, as I gather many of Ms DiFranco’s songs are, about resentful anger, and this is not an emotion that suits Dianne Reeves at all. Everything about her persona suggests a someone skilled at avoiding occasions of resentment. And one tour of the lyrics of “32 Flavors” was enough. Thirty-two rounds, or what began to feel that many, sounded impoverished.

Ms Reeves’s band was great, no surprise. But I didn’t show up to hear a band, and what was also no surprise was my liking best the two duets that figured in the program, “One For My Baby,” with her bass player, Reginald Veal, and “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” with Brazilian guitarist (and source of significant inspiration) Romero Lubambo. These songs could have gone on to twice their length without palling. What I didn’t much like was the full band’s attack on “Stormy Weather.” I appreciated the chart’s success at rendering the song itself stormy, or at least dangerously unmoored, but I felt that one of my favorite pieces in the songbook was taking a beating. 

A few nights later, Kathleen and I were talking about cabaret nightclubs such as the Plaza Hotel’s long-gone Persian Room, and sighing wistfully. We’re unlikely to see the likes of them again. And Dianne Reeves’s concert at the Rose shows why. From the musicians’ standpoint, things couldn’t be better. They get to perform in a large but acoustically rewarding hall before an audience undistracted by food, drink, or waitstaff. I cannot say that the now-settled installation of jazz in the formal concert hall is shortchanging its excitement. (Ms Reeves received a warm and very enthusiastic response from a full house.) If anything, it’s teaching audiences at classical music concerts to be a bit more lively. The one thing that doesn’t vary is that everyone is there for the music.

***

After dinner, I’ve sat down to look at the mail. In the spam folder, a note from someone anonymous who is summarizing Montaigne’s essays in order, one a day, in Web log. The summaries, so far, are extremely readable, and even sound like Montaigne — what Montaigne would sound like if he were writing blog entries. Now that nobody has all the time in the world…

There’s a lot to report, but my head is still very cloudy. I sat up very late last night to finish Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn, a novel that went down like the silkiest of desserts but then left the most perplexing aftertaste, which I shall eventually sort out, I suppose, but not this morning, when it is all I can do to remember that I myself am not a character in Coral Glynn.

Earlier in the evening, we saw Cynthia Nixon in Margaret Edson’s Wit. Kathleen completely crumpled for a few moments afterward, out in the street, overcome by the sadness and grief, still abiding, of a very close friend’s death a few years ago. I felt doubly terrible about her pain, because I hadn’t thought about the close friend at all. I’d thought of my mother, who died of chemotherapy over thirty years ago; of my aunt, who almost certainly saw Wit at some point in her theatregoing life and who very well may have been persuaded by it to avoid aggressive medical interventions when she failed to recovery properly from appendicitis last December — my aunt, as I knew her, was someone who would do anything to avoid being reduced to yelling, “It hurts like hell!” in an empty hospital room, and who would certainly prefer to die quietly in hospice, as she did; and I thought of myself, because I am much more familiar with some of the machinery that rolled about onstage than I was when I saw Wit the first time, long before Remicade came into my life. I didn’t think of Kathleen’s very close friend, and I was deeply ashamed for a minute or two. Then Kathleen spotted a taxi and we went to dinner.

***

And I thought about John Donne, whom I haven’t read in years, but whom I’d studied closely enough in school to know why he came to be considered a metaphysical poet. It’s ironic, really: at the very moment when the Aristotelian world-view, with its essences and epicycles and magnificent Judeo-Christian appliqués, was beginning its Inception-like crumbling into the sea of discarded ideas, just when Galileo and Newton were about to recreate the universe with very different laws, the English poets (Shakespeare certainly among them) created a gorgeous liturgy of love and divinity, set in rigorously “scientific” terms.

If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
My soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as it comes home.

The reflorescence of Donne’s popularity among smart people coincided with the push to turn the humanities into sciences, with rules as geometrically invariable as anything in Euclid. Vivian Bearing, the poetry professor who is dying of ovarian cancer in Wit, embodies this dream in her stern teaching. Her course is so demanding that students take it simply to burnish their resumes, and what supreme irony it is when one of her former students, motivated by ambition, not love of learning, to do well in her course, reappears in her life as an apprentice chemotherapist, a student in training to learn how to see right through her animal wretchedness to the treatment’s toxic effectiveness.

How ironic — Edson is to be commended for muffling what might have been an insistent and therefore dulling chord in the composition of her play — for a scholar of metaphysical poetry to be treated by her doctors as a “specimen jar,” as she puts it, containing deadly tumors. Isn’t that way of becoming metaphysical oneself? A sympathetic nurse alerts the audience to the horror of the professionals’ callous disregard, but, as one of them herself, Vivian Bearing understands that the doctors are doing what they must (however roughly). Whether the moments of kindness that grace her ending amount to more than palliative care for the audience, I couldn’t say.

***

Do I have the right word here: how ironic it was to read Peter Cameron right on top of Edward St Aubyn? I will say this: between those two authors, Wit, and a gargantuan backup project that kept this computer busy throughout the night and now has me somewhat on tenterhooks, I feel rather like Patrick Melrose in his room at the Pierre, in Bad News, wondering what to next in order to counteract what he has already taken in the mad course of his self-inflicted chemotherapy.  

How can I more quickly persuade you not to read Edward St Aubyn’s A Clue to the Exit than by touting it as a novel “about consciousness”? That’s pretty much what the Sunday Times (London) does in a blurb printed on the back: “Striking metaphors and resonant evocations of sea and desert… accomplished reflections on the possibility of selfhood and the insolubility of consciousness.” It would not take much effort, I expect, for St Aubyn to tweak those lines into a grimly fatuous but also terribly funny parody of his own style. (I am going to resist the temptation to give it a try.) What grand and airy nonsense! It’s nonsense in that it presents A Clue to the Exit as if it belonged to the tradition of English travelogues in which, knowing nothing about them, really, I place Richard Burton, Robert Byron, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Or perhaps a successor to Under the Sheltering Sky. Only instead of the Oxus or Ararat, we’re taken on a tour of the writer’s primitive and chaotic state of mind.

But St Aubyn, a born parodist, doesn’t stop there. He no mere entertainer — another thing that I probably oughtn’t to tell you if I want to you read the book — no mere fetcher-up of exotic locales and understated insights. He’s more like a really good workout coach, teaching you how to use muscles that you didn’t know you had while making you laugh quite a bit more than you expected to do. You don’t laugh all the time, but when you’ve negotiated one of his thornier sentences — limpidly constructed and perfectly easy to parse but copulating unlikely pairs of statements that you really do have to stop to process — when you finally get one of these, you smile. Now, I myself have never worked with a workout coach, much less a really good one, so I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but it seemed to me that invoking a workout coach would make the book sound more appealing. That kind of book, then. The kind of book that treats you to a good workout. And if St Aubyn didn’t actually show me muscles that I didn’t know I had, he did teach me a few things about getting them to work.

The first thing I want to say about A Clue to the Exit is that is successful in ways that On the Edge, his immediately previous novel, is not. Off the top of my head, I can think of several reasons why this is so. The subject of inquiry in Clue is focused on one thing,  consciousness; whereas the concerns of Edge are diffused among all the varieties of spiritual enlightenment, from drugs to Tantric sex. Clue is narrated in the first person by one man; Edge is written in the third person, from several points of view. One of the points of view in On the Edge is that of Crystal Bukowski, and I am not sure that St Aubyn is up to female impersonation; for the life of me, I couldn’t shake the very unwanted image of Barbra Streisand every time Crystal opened her mouth. Crystal reappears in A Clue to the Exit, but as a figure in a drolly unentertaining little novel (about consciousness) that the narrator is trying to write during the short time left to him to live, she makes vastly reduced claims on our sympathy. St Aubyn has also learned how to avoid making the reader anxious that there is going to be a test, a test that the reader will certainly fail. Finally, A Clue to the Exit has a very simple plot that flies along like a madcap TGV (in delightful contrast to the train in the novel-within-the-novel, which breaks down at Didcot Junction). You could say that, in A Clue to the Exit, St Aubyn has learned how to write a “difficult” novel that still does all of the things that you want a novel to do. I don’t think that I’m prepared to say that, however. I think that there’s plenty of room for improvement, and I wish the author many long, productive years of filling it, and myself many long years to watch him do it.

***

Here is an example of St Aubyn’s hip, witty, and challenging prose, taken from the latter part of A Clue to the Exit.

When writers imagine a character who is dying, or condemned to die, they all to often make him ruminate about the past, worrying that he may not have led a good life, or being haunted by some forking in the road when he ran away from true love, or failed to save a friend’s life. Something with tons of flashbacks, and a big violin section. Either the character claims to have a few regrets but, then again, too few to mention after page 300, or he has the incredible courage and honesty to regret everything and wish he had not done it his way. In either case, the main feeling about dying, namely that it’s happening too soon, is blurred by a preoccupation with the past.

Well, those of us who are dying — as opposed to those who are lounging around in their studies making dinner engagements, and then reluctantly disconnecting the phone for twenty minutes in order to browse through a medical textbook and look up some realistic details — those of us who are really dying haven’t got time to ponder the past. The present is scintillating with horror and precision. The past is a luxury for people who think they have a future. Does my life have subtle connecting threads, strange coincidences, uniting themes? You’d better believe it. Things can’t help repeating themselves, can’t help colliding. That’s not meaning, it’s where the search for meaning begins.

Note the interpenetration of narrative (someone is dying) and criticism (novelists usually get dying wrong). This is by no means the most challenging passage in A Clue to the Exit; far from it. But the writing is almost always this lucid, this emphatic.

***

As I read A Clue to the Exit, I thought a lot about consciousness, a topic that once upon a time interested me enough to get me to make my way through Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. That’s a sneaky way of saying that I, too, believed that consciousness could be explained. My belief these days is that (a) I’m not equipped to study the matter, which I leave to the cognitologists in their laboratories and (b) “consciousness” is a word that, in general usage, covers many different mental phenomena. Eventually, the second statement is going to be confirmed, denied, or rendered meaningless by the scientists mentioned in the first statement, but while they’re at it I am free to attend to what I notice about my own life.

I don’t believe that there is any one way to characterize one’s mental state throughout the entire day, from getting out of bed to getting back into it. For legal convenience, we say that this time is spent consciously, but all we mean by that is that there very well may be a test, so pay attention. When we are not concerned with legal convenience, and are pretty sure that there is not going to be a test, our minds — may I beg the reader’s indulgence as I proceed in comfortable editorial plural? — move from one moment to the next in whatever manner uses the least energy. That is not a conscious decision, of course; it is the physics of survival, hardwired into the simplest organisms, and our cerebrums have not evolved beyond the elemental constraint.

Sense data piles up in heaps of triviality (if we’re lucky); we now know that parts of the brain that are not conscious attend to these inputs more or less constantly. Meanwhile, other parts of the brain talk to each other, again without intruding upon consciousness. A great deal of brainwork goes to the utterly unconscious business of regulating and registering bodily functions that it would drive us mad to be aware of, and do drive us mad when we are ill. I can’t begin to tell you how fear and desire fit into this scheme, but they bubble along in their abstracted way, coloring and otherwise interfering with our awareness of what’s going on around us. I have introduced awareness. Is it the same thing as consciousness? I don’t much care, I’m not trying to explain a system that I hardly understand. I only want to write down what seems to be happening, and what seems to be happening is that some feedback processor in my brain weighs and considers the multitude of neuronal firings according to algorithms of varying degrees of force and returns its findings to an ongoing report that, over many years, takes on the identity of “me.” (It is arguable that this identity is not complete until “I” have been ravaged by adolescence.) I’ve shamelessly borrowed the labels of mechanical computers to sketch this account, and the last thing I’d recommend is the hunt for an actual “feedback processor” or a list of the “algorithms” among the lobes of the brain. All I want to convey is the suggestion that what we call consciousness is nothing but a stream of different types of mental event.

It seems to me, further, that the richer one’s life is — the better one’s health and physical endowment, the more ample one’s resources, the denser one’s relations with other people — the mightier the stream of consciousness is going to be, the more terrifying ones’ sense of helplessly shooting unforeseeable rapids. It’s no surprise, then, to find, at the top of the tree, writers like Edward St Aubyn, fiercely studying the workings of consciousness in hopes of controlling it without turning it off. Turning it off would be dying, which, Mr Aubyn reminds us, always happens too soon.

¶ At Grantland,Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier foresee the death of the NFL over the next ten to fifteen years. (via Marginal Revolution; 2/13)

This outcome may sound ridiculous, but the collapse of football is more likely than you might think. If recent history has shown anything, it is that observers cannot easily imagine the big changes in advance. Very few people were predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, or the rise of China as an economic power. Once you start thinking through how the status quo might unravel, a sports universe without the NFL at its center no longer seems absurd.

¶ Whatever else you make of it, we think that Maureen Tkacik’s consideration of Walter Isaacson’s book suggests that the hitherto much-admired biography is not likely to be the last word about Steve Jobsor the manufacturing practices that made him rich. Tkacik also sounds a new alarm (Reuters; via The Millions) :

t gradually dawned on me after this encounter that much of the cultural nonsense I presumed had died with the tech bubble was alive and well. Especially wherever brands had adequately inoculated themselves against the threat of the proverbial “burst,” which in this case just happened to involve a ban on bubblegum. And the nonsense was proliferating. It occurred to me at some point that exploitation would be accepted as so fundamental to the general “lifestyle” that slavery itself could be recast in the jargon of “aspiration.”

¶ What’s the most exciting part of Jonah Lehrer’s piece about “obliviating potions” at Wired? It’s hard to say, there are so many. This long read about the latest thinking about the nature of memory, plus treatments that have chemically enhanced the talking cure to free some patients of intolerable PTSD, suggests, even more than Mr Lehrer’s reports usually do, that we are speeding down the Informatioin Superhighway toward unimaginable destinations. (via The Browser; 2/20) ¶ On the occasion of what would have been David Foster Wallace’s fiftieth birthday, Letters of Note publishes an anguished plea for advice sent to Don DeLillo when Wallace was 33. (2/27)

This is not coming across like I want it to; I can’t make this clear. Maybe your work is this form of profound marriage only to and for me; maybe it’s some weird subjective misprision that has to do with me and not your fiction; maybe you have no thoughts on how you’ve come to make (apparent) Respect and Dedication seem so fuck-all much (apparent) Fun. If you do have any thoughts — together with a couple minutes to rub together — I’d be grateful for them. I’m about as professionally flummoxed as I’ve ever been.

¶ The Economist reviews the new Charles Murray book. “Your own columnist, a jaundiced Brit residing temporarily in a SuperZip, wonders how the lower class will respond to hearing that the main help it needs is an infusion of its betters’ morals.” Indeed. (2/8) ¶ Axel Preston considers four new novels inspired by Trollope’s classic, The Way We Live Now, and argues that they do indeed have to be set in London. We can’t wait for the Lanchester! (Guardian; via Arts Journal; 2/13) ¶ Andrea Scrima writes about Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods as the political tract that, however funny, it really is. (The Rumpus; 2/17)

When Renée says: “You could argue that a deal that asks you to do something physically disgusting for a limited period, and gives you free use of your own mind in exchange, is actually not such a bad bargain,” what DeWitt really seems to be addressing is the agony of not having free use of your own mind, of being hindered by the exigencies of making a living, trapped in stupefying wage-earning work and forced to perform a mundane function that serves someone else’s purposes. In an America obsessed with success and failure, with getting a shot at the ever-elusive American dream, it’s the plight of a brilliant mind with a set of skills not immediately convertible into currency—damned to being part of the ant colony, the beehive, to eking out the hours in a task far below its capacities—that pains us the most.

¶ Not so fast, cautions Tyler Cowen, reviewing ballyhooed experiments showing that rich people are more likely than others to cheat and to steal. We didn’t buy it, either, but Tyler does a better job than we could of putting the “results” where they belong. (2/28) ¶ Why this is a good time to invest; no, seriously. (Abnormal Returns, 2/29)

¶ Don’t be surprised if the permanent title of this month’s edition of Beachcoming (affixed when it is no longer a page in progress) turns out to be “Blocking Coalition.” We’ve just come across the term in an entry at Overcoming Bias. Robin Hansonasks why companies pay consultants so much money for what is basically the advice of recent college graduates. He answers that the prestige of the consulting firms enables CEOs to undermine the “blocking coalitions” that in any large organization emerge as a mutual-protection society among senior bureaucrats. We’re not persuaded that consulting firms contribute anything of actual value, but we’re delighted to have such a sterling addition to our collection of reasons why large corporations make no sense. When Mr Hanson writes, “My guess is that most intellectuals underestimate just how dysfunctional most firms are,” we hope that he’s right, and we hope that they’ll wake up. (via The Morning News; 2/3) ¶ According to Farhad Manjoo, even without a Facebook IPO, Mark Zukerberg has made Silicon Valley’s engineers richer — by refusing to cooperate in an anti-poaching scheme currently in anti-trust litigation. (Pando daily; via Abnormal Returns; 2/6) ¶ We don’t allow New York Magazine in the house, and Chris Lehman’s dismantlement of Gabriel Sherman’s intellectually vegetative report from a Wall Street “emasculated” by financial regulation reminds us why. (The Awl) ¶ Although he recommends reading the Sherman piece, Joshua Brown retains our trust with his complaint that “No One Is Ever Wrong Anymore.” (The Reformed Broker; 2/7) ¶ Too brilliant for words: an unprecedented way of making schoolwork benefit everybody!

According to the Wikimedia Foundation blog,professors from nine nations are participating in the two-year-old Wikipedia Education Program, which allows them to assign articles to their students. In the United States, about 50 classes are participating in the editing effort. Student contributors “are expected to put in as much work into the Wikipedia assignments as they would put into a term paper or other large assignment,” the program’s founders say.

We think that this is only marginally less amazing, and vastly more useful, than squaring the circle. (GOOD; 2/23) ¶ Nick Paumgarten went to Davos this year, and Felix Salmon assures us that he got it more or less right the first time, even though that’s not supposed to happen. From this week’s New Yorker (2/28):

People like to project onto Davos their fears and fantasies about the way the world works. Right-wingers see insidious, delusional liberalism, in its stakeholder ethos and its pretense of world improvement. They picture a bunch of Keynesians, Continentals, and self-dealing do-gooders participating in some kind of off-the-books top-down command-control charade. Left-wingers conjure a plutocratic cabal, a Star Chamber of master puppeteers, the one per cent—or .01 per cent, really—deciding the world’s fate behind a curtain of heavy security and utopian doublespeak. The uninvited, the refuseniks, and even many of the participants see a colossal discharge of hot air, a peacock strut.

¶ Jonathan Franzen may be convinced that serious readers will always prefer books, but Avi Steinberg, exploring the latest developments in librarian porn, reveals apocalyptic misgivings. (The Paris Review; via MetaFilter; 2/1) ¶ Writing about Pulpheadwith great élan, M Rebecca Otto asks, “The question facing us at millennium’s end was: how can we possibly survive all this goddamn freedom?” Indeed. (The Rumpus; 2/1) ¶ Reif Larsen writes about infogasms; the powers and pitfalls of visual storytelling. (The Millions; 2/8) ¶ Catching up with Levi Stahl’s blog, we came across some invaluable musings about Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch, and Anthony Powell, dating from the middle of last month. Our apologies! (I’ve Been Reading Lately) ¶ Abby Mims, surrounded by cancer, appreciates Joan Didion more than ever. “I feel I will live much the same haunted way when my mother dies.” (The Rumpus; 2/13) ¶ Do not fail to read Maria Bustillos’s amused but fertile essay on romance fiction, which contains one of the clearest analyses of genre fiction that we’ve ever come across. Hint to male would-be romance writers: women do not appraise themselves admiringly in the mirror. No, sir. (The Awl; 2/14) ¶ At The Point, a lengthy, anti-“liberal” defense of David Foster Wallace in particular and the experimental novel in general, by Jon Baskin. Or is it an attack on Jonathan Franzen and the anti-American novel? Whichever, it’s quite well-written and -thought-out, even if it does almost completely overlook both writers’ problems with American family life. (via 3 Quarks Daily; 2/20) ¶ An anonymous philosophy grad student appraises Jane Austen as a moral philosopher and finds that she’s very good at it. Curiously, he seems to believe that Austen’s fiction is unrealistic, and that her plots and characters are mere confections designed to illustrate her philosophy. We suppose that it is a lot to ask, to expect a philosopher, especially one in graduate school, to understand the comic. (The Philosopher’s Beard; via The Browser) ¶ Colm Tóibín speculates on the role of parental death or frustration in the making of a writer. “…the idea that I was writing, pushing myself to work, almost because they could not or did not…” (Guardian; via The Browser; 2/27) ¶ Lisa Peel reminds us of the strange career and luminous work of Walker Percy, whose The Moviegoer we’re thinking of re-reading as a result. (The Millions; 2/29)

¶ A brief but sobering essay on how persistent racism in America can “grind a man or woman down in horrible ways,” by James McBride, who is not best pleased that Oscar nominations are still being handed out to black actors who play housemaids. (40Acres; via MetaFilter; 2/1) ¶ Jason Kottke notes what looks to us like a Jobs Hangover: a minitrend of entrepreneurs who have slowed down since Steve Jobs died. Was Jobs “the John Henry of our time?” The exciting thing is realizing how unimaginable such misgivings among men would have been a generation ago.(2/8) ¶ Choire Sicha implores the young people of Gotham to “put a fucking boot in the face of the soulless careerist.” Don’t let the vampires, the drama queens, and the bitter underminers distract you from the real wickedness! Choire throws in a picture of Tracy Flick as a reminder. (The Awl; 2/13) ¶ Emma Garman discovers that her inborn rejection of all things princess has been overcome by the delight of watching tabloid hacks tear their hair out waiting for Kate to do something wrong. As for Uncle Gary, “perhaps it’s not too much to hope that he’s been taken under the wing of Prince Andrew.” (The Awl; 2/17)

¶ It’s sweet to think that Verdi’s greatest contribution was the Casa di Riposoin Milan, a retiremement home for musicians that’s still going. But of course it’s not. We can’t think of any other philanthropists who gave us the likes of Don Carlo. (LA Times; via Arts Journal; 2/6) ¶ Simon Schama’s visit with Cindy Sherman yields a dandy preview to the coming MoMA show. “Hers is the real Facebook (the one we all mistake for human connection, she avoids like the plague).” (FT Magazine; via The Morning News; 2/10) ¶ Jonathan Blumhofer’s review of The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras, by Stanford professor Robert Flanagan, covers all the bases in the world of arts financing, and raises good questions about arriving at the right dollar figure to attach to the living of a highly-trained professional musician. (The Arts Fuse; via Arts Journal; 2/17)

¶ Jim Emerson almost says that The Artist is fun — but he stops at calling it an interesting movie to watch. Same thing, in our book, but we like the great critics to spell it out now and then. Maybe next time. (Scanners; 2/6) ¶ Sonia Saraiya watches Atonement on a gloomy day, and learns that her own just-ended romance “had a great trailer, but the movie never worked right.” (The Awl; 2/17) ¶ Have you got all day? Jim Emerson has rounded up some corking reviews — analyses, really — of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that establish the film as the best-made movie of 2011. (Scanners; 2/17) ¶ We think that it was ill-advised of James Fenton to make use of the jump-the-shark trope when dismissing Downtown Abbey, but we were still secretly pleased that we hadn’t tuned in. (LRB; 2/20) ¶ What is the mot juste for Maria Bustillos’s enthusiastic piece about The Artist? “Sprawling” — that’s the word for it. But enthusiastic! Liberté! Fraternité! Amitié! (The Awl; 2/23) ¶ Bill Morris identifies himself as an anti-Kaelite film viewer. It all comes down to whether you prefer blinking or thinking. He’s a thinker. Kael, famously, boasted of never seeing any movie more than once — the most asinine claim that any critic has ever made. Morris is only too happy to let Geoff Dyer’s new Zona guide him through Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (The Millions) ¶ Virginia Postrel has three very interesting ideas for improving the Academy Awards show. Although we’re very happy about The Artist and all, we do agree that commercial popularity deserves its own Oscar spotlight. (Bloomberg; via Arts Journal) ¶ Charles McNulty fesses up to his “Meryl Street problem.” We know what he’s talking about, but we suspect that he’s thinking too hard about Ms Streep’s talents. She always makes us forget who she is; she also makes us forget that the person whom she’s impersonating is not “her.” (LA Times; via Arts Journal; 2/27)

¶ What we wouldn’t give to hear Greta Gerwig do a podcast of Logan Sachon’s dating tips for men as compiled from 2,208 questionnaires. “Girls are really, really, really sick of wasting first dates talking about The Wire and Game of Thrones.” (The Awl; 2/15) ¶ Stephany Aulenback makes Impossible Pie with such intellectual excitement that you never wonder “why?” (The Awl; 2/17)

Have a Look: ¶ Eye candy for the non-squeamish: “Aspergillius fumigatus botrytis mucor trichoderma cladosporium.” (via MetaFilter; 2/1) ¶ “Judging Books By Their Covers” — last year’s dust jackets from both sides of the pond. (The Millions; 2/8) ¶ Jean Dujardin To Star In Everything. (Funny or Die; 2/10). ¶ Michael Cunningham’s bath room. (via The Morning News; 2/15)

Noted: ¶ We’re old, but not this old:  “Six Things That Are Dead, According to Harold Bloom.” (Big Think; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Movies that all at The Awl will drop everything to watch on TV. Groundhog Day is a clear favorite. (2/1) ¶ Top 5 regrets of the dying. (Guardian; via MetaFilter; 2/6) Gillian Steinhauer on lists: “We risk becoming masters of our own triviality.” (The Awl; 2/8) ¶ Open Stax College, a line of free textbooks from Rice University. (GOOD; 2/13) ¶ Shocking art more shocking if shock precedes art. (Miller-McCune; via Arts Journal; 2/15) ¶ 2012 doomsday nonsense is scaring kids, and may trigger suicides. (Bad Astronomy; 2/23) ¶ Should 3 year-olds learn computer programming? (GOOD; 2/27) ¶ McDonald’s fries at home. (Serious Eats; via The Morning News; 2/29)