Fiction: “Solar” by Ian McEwan

To say that I was disappointed in reading Solar would be putting it somewhat mildly. I have read two other novels and one novella by McEwan (Atonement, Enduring Love, and Amsterdam, respectively), and loved them all. In every work that I’ve read by him, I’ve been amazed and awed by his use of language, how he twists words around and strings together truly beautiful sentences.

But this novel — true, his language technique is still there; he still wraps sentences around his finger using large, lyrical words, but his protagonist isn’t even an anti-hero; he’s just awful.

I was talking to a friend about the book the other day, and I commented that I distinctly didn’t like the main character (I believe the term I used was “shitheel” — and I called him a shitheel during the entire conversation, much like Pete Campbell on Mad Men will always and forever be known as “Bitchface” to me), and I didn’t really want to finish it, but I needed to know what happened. It’s kind of like when I read Wideacre the first time — I hated Beatrice Lacey, but knew instinctually that something had to happen to her to lead her to either redemption or inevitable destruction.

The protagonist of Solar is Michael Beard, a Nobel Laureate for coming up with something called the Beard-Einstein Conflation, which has something to do with photovoltaics, which from what I can gather, has something to do with light and energy. Look, all I know about science I learned from The Big Bang Theory, so I can’t really be held responsible for getting this junk right. Anyway, in the year 2000, Beard is watching his fifth marriage crumble. How this guy was married five times is beyond me, because every time he described himself, he prided himself on his numerous affairs and his attractiveness to women. Which is also beyond me, as he describes himself as being short, fat, and bald. There’s two-thirds of a joke in there about a friend of mine, but he’s too good a friend for me to make it. Also, it would create a comparison between him and Beard, and Beard’s a shitheel, where my friend is not. So.

Anyway. Beard’s soon-to-be-ex, Patrice, is taking up with their contractor, Rodney Tarpin. Meanwhile Beard is working on a wind turbine at this Center or whatever, struggling with climate change and looking for more sustainable energy. And there’s this kid, Thomas Aldous, and he drives Beard back and forth from his flat to work, because Aldous is an intern, and that’s what interns do. Aldous has some fantastical ideas about using solar energy to create fuel by synthesizing photosynthesis, but Beard poo-poohs the idea and returns to ideas on how to make his wife love him again.

Then Beard goes on a trip to the Arctic, and in a moment that would have been AWE-INSPIRING in the way of making Alaina not turn away from this book: Beard almost loses his penis.

No, go with me on this. He wakes up late in his hotel in Sweden or wherever the eff, and he has to run downstairs to make the snowmobile caravan to this boat in the middle of the icy Arctic Ocean. As such, he doesn’t have time for breakfast, or his morning bathroom break. So he’s driving this snowmobile, when all of a sudden, his bladder can’t take it anymore. So he stops, goes to take a piss in the middle of the frozen tundra, and then becomes surprised when his dick sticks to the zipper of his snowsuit, four gazillion times worse than Flick sticking his tongue to the telephone pole. He gets immediate frostbite to his johnson, manages to unstick it using his hip flask of brandy as lubricant, then returns to his compatriot in the caravan and sits astride his snowmobile. And then this happens:

Something cold and hard had dropped from Beard’s groin and fallen down inside the leg of his long johns and was now lodged just above his kneecap. He put his hand between his legs and there was nothing. He put his hand on his knee and the hideous object, less than two inches long, was stiff like a bone. It did not feel, or it no longer felt, like a part of himself. [63-64]

And I sat up in bed, first with empathy pain, but secondly with “HOLY SHIT THAT’S AWESOME.”

But his dick didn’t fall off. He didn’t even have to put it in a box or anything. He had some intense pain, but it didn’t break. In fact, in the next two sections, he has even more sex than he does in the first part. What a letdown. McEwan could have done SO MUCH MORE with that, and he decided not to Go There.

So Beard comes home from the Arctic, and finds not Tarpin at his house after having sex with his wife, but Aldous. And after a confrontation, Aldous accidentally slips on a rug and hits his head on the corner of the coffee table, and dies. Beard frames Tarpin for the crime, and rids himself of multiple problems in one fell swoop.

Fast-forward five years, and Tarpin’s in jail for murder, Beard has stolen Aldous’s works towards rejuvenating solar energy, and has a new lover named Melissa. He has also grown to be more of a shitheel, and fatter. And then Melissa reveals that she loves him, but wants a baby more, so she went off her birth control and now she’s seven weeks pregnant.

The final part takes place in 2009, on the eve of the great unveiling of the synthetic photosynthesis, and all of his lies come into fruition and are almost revealed.

There was one big error that McEwan makes. In the section when Beard is in the Arctic, turning his junk into a frozen weiner (and remember, this is in the year 2000), Beard remembers this:

He had read of an American hiking alone in the wilderness who got his arm trapped behind a rock and sawed through his own elbow with a penknife. [60]

Now, every February, I attempt Oscar!Watch, where I watch all the movies nominated for the major categories of Academy Awards. Which meant that yes, this February, I sat through 127 Hours. And when I read the above sentence, I thought, “Wait, I thought that happened in 2004?”

Turns out, it was 2003, but still. Unless there is another poor soul who got his arm trapped behind a rock and needed to perform self-amputation, McEwan’s facts needed a stricter check.

All in all, I’m still disappointed in the book. I feel that it could have been so much better, but in the end, Beard is neither redeemed nor destroyed. What the hell? How is that a good ending?

Rating for Solar: 1 star

Fiction: “The Late Hector Kipling” by David Thewlis

First, let me address your first question: yes, it is that David Thewlis. The one that played Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter movies. But you won’t find a single vestige of that boy wizard in this novel.

The narrator is Harold Kipling, and Kipling happens to be an artist. The book starts with him and his artist friend, Lenny Snook, wandering the halls of the Tate, looking at art. When gazing at a painting by Edvard Munch, Kipling begins to bawl, and thus begins Kipling’s downward spiral. His girlfriend, Eleni, has to go back to Crete to be with her mother, who’s dying from severe burns. One of his best friends, Kirk Church, has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Lenny is a finalist for a prestigious art award and Hector may or may not be experiencing pangs of jealousy. And when I say “may or may not,” I’m not being coy — Kipling genuinely doesn’t know.

Another contributing factor to Kipling’s downfall is the settee belonging to his parents. That piece starts when blood is spilled on the white settee. After it’s ruined, his mother goes out and buys another settee, which cost upwards of 800 pounds. The large expenditure gives his father a panic attack, sending him to the hospital.

Meanwhile, while Eleni is in Crete, Kipling engages in an affair with a twenty-year-old American poet named Rosa Flood. Rosa Flood happens to have an interest in S&M.

And on top of all that, Kipling has a show at a gallery, including a portrait of a dead man. On the opening, the dead man’s son defaces the portrait and then runs away. Later, he turns up and offers Kipling a solution to his parents’ settee problem, which in turn seals the deal on Kipling’s full psychotic breakdown.

I can’t really say much more than that without giving away the farm. I was impressed with Thewlis’s writing, although, the more I think on it, I’m not sure ‘impressed’ is the word I’m looking for. After all, I’ve always had an assumption that all British actors are well-read and great writers. Even Russell Brand, and I didn’t like his book hardly at all. But Thewlis’s novel had a very Beckett-like quality to the dialogue, which I enjoy. And Thewlis (through Kipling) tries to understand what death does to us all – how we interact with it, what we feel when loved ones are threatened by it, what we think about it. He has an interesting take on it, linking it to the art world and especially how artists interact with death through their art.

The two things I didn’t like about the book really had nothing to do with the plot; it was a matter of taste. First, Kipling mentioned that Lichtenstein was a douche. To which I say: LICHTENSTEIN is NOT a DOUCHE. He happens to be one of my favorite artists, and I appreciate the themes he illustrates using comic book techniques.  (In other words, shut up Brad, you don’t know what you’re talking about.)  Also, he mentioned Chuck Klose. I HAAAATE Chuck Klose. He’s disturbing and crazy.

Anyway. This was an interesting read. I finished it in a few days, and when I wasn’t reading it, I did think about what was going to happen in the plot, which I think is always a good sign. Will I read it again? I’m not sure. If he writes another book, will I read it? Again, I don’t know. But if you like art and weird shit happening, then sure, have at it?

Grade for The Late Hector Kipling: 2 stars

Fiction: “Boomsday” by Christopher Buckley

“Can’t tonight. Gotta go back and blog.”

“‘Gotta go back and blog.’” Terry shook his head. “I’m offering martinis and mentoring. But if you want to go home and blog …” He looked at Cass with his “kind uncle” expression. “Excuse me for asking, but do you by any chance have a life?” [7]

It’s like Terry is talking to me.

Boomsday takes place in a currently-fictionalized-but-could-become-true version of the United States in a modern-day time frame. In this alternate universe, Social Security is due to run out oh, about now. Cassandra Devine (the aforementioned Cass) is a publicist-cum-blogger who is really pissed off at the idea that the Boomer Generation which is currently running the country is passing the Social Security responsibility onto her generation, Generation Whatever. So she blogs, and in a fit of pique, she comes up with an idea: grant tax cuts to Boomers who kill themselves at the age of 70, thereby saving their Social Security benefits and making the program financially solvent. She calls it “Voluntary Transitioning.” She is good friends with a Senator from Massachusetts and he takes it to the Hill where it becomes a bill and then it becomes a talking point for the President and there’s some whole big family drama between Cass and her estranged father and look, it’s BORING.

Maybe it was the plot (which sounded a lot better on the backflap), or maybe it’s the fact that I bought a Nintendo DS three days ago and I became completely addicted within two hours, but it took me way too long to finish this book. And more than that, I became disillusioned with the book. Like, it was promising to be this riveting tome about something that somewhat concerns me – the debts associated with our country and the fact that much of the debt the country is currently sitting on will become our responsibility (“our” meaning, not to quote Pete Townsend, “my generation”), but somewhere along the way the plot got away from Voluntary Transitioning and turned into How Someone Runs for the Presidency, with a side-jaunt into Oh Those Wacky Priests, Ordering from a Russian Escort Service.

I think I was so disappointed because it had the promise to be so much better. And don’t get me started on the ending – for all of its faults, and considering how long it took me to get through it, the ending felt rushed, flat, and cheap.

Not only that, but — well, here’s an example. I was reading on my lunch break at work, and I apparently skipped a page. The only reason I found out that I had skipped a page was because I flipped backwards, thinking I had forgotten something that was mentioned. If I hadn’t forgotten about that (minor) plot point, I would never have read pps. 202-203, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because skipping those two pages did not diminish the cohesion and coherency of the plot.

Not to say there wasn’t anything amusing about this book. Unfortunately, the humor only served to remind me of other things:

“This boy is done with suffering! This boy is going to party down and howl at the moon and get laid! I am going to know women! I’m going to know them every which way from Sunday!” [216]

This reminded me of the clip from Arrested Development‘s episode “Beef Consomme” where Buster decided he wanted to become a man. (skip ahead to the 5:00 mark.):

I mean, there is so much in life that I have not experienced! And now that I’m away from Mom, I feel like this is my chance to live. I want to dance! I want to make love to a woman! I want to get a checking account! I want to know what it feels like to get my face socked in! [Buster, "Beef Consomme," Arrested Development]

The Senator who supports Voluntary Transitioning and ends up running for president also happens to be an amputee:

[The Senator], Cass, and Terry had a heated discussion about whether it was “presidential” to wave artificial limbs over one’s head during speeches. Cass and Terry finally said they’d resign if he did. Randy backed down. After he left the room, Terry said to Cass, “I’m going to Super Glue that thing to his stump for the duration of this campaign.” [263-264]

This rings completely true:

What a country, America. A lunatic asylum, without enough attendants or tranquilizers. [269]

And finally, something that is only funny to me (I’m sure), from a third Presidential candidate:

“That is normally when they hold the presidential debates [in the fall], is it not? Though I imagine we’ll be bumping into each other in New Hampshire and Iowa before then. I imagine it’s very cold in New Hampshire in February. Not my favorite climate. No, no. I am a creature of the South … I suppose I will need one of those puffy parka things from that Yankee store — what’s it called — L.L. Bean? Good day to you again, sir.” [263]

*sniff* Yankee store. Y’know, that kind of offends me like the entire Nancy Whatever plotline from 30 Rock last year. Julianne Moore’s Nancy character was so horrible that it turned me off of 30 Rock almost completely. As if the bad Boston accent wasn’t enough, just painting Boston as completely Irish Catholic and Red Sox-oriented pissed me off.

So, yeah, I didn’t like it. Guess who else didn’t like it?

“So what you’re saying is, you’ve been playing Ratify the Bill with your boy-toy pedagogue who tried to Chappaquiddick you in a minefield, and now you’re miffed because he’s not taking your grand idea seriously enough? Darling, you should concern yourself more with your follow-through and conviction and less with how to curb his premature exposition. Now if you’ll excuse me; my scarf and I have important political matters to attend to.”

Grade for Boomsday: 1 star

Fiction: “A Single Man” by Christopher Isherwood

I am a huge fan of The Soup on E!. Really, it’is the only show I watch on E!, though I do occasionally catch the opening of Chelsea Lately (you know? She’s funny, but not hilarious). The Soup has an extra factor than just irony, sarcasm, and hilarious out-of-context clips: its host is Alaina’s Pretend Boyfriend #3, Joel McHale (of Community! Which everyone must watch! Screw Bones and Big Bang Theory!).

You may be wondering: “Uh, Alaina? Did you get your entry windows confused? You’re writing in your book blog right now.” I know — I’m getting to it. Because see, on The Soup, there are different categories of clips. Joel usually starts with some standard clips from random shows, then goes into “Reality Show Clip Time!”, and that usually consists of clips from Jersey Shore and Big Brother and definitely The Bachelorette. There’s always some “Chat Stew” (soo meaty), which covers the morning talk shows (“Get Off My Lawn with Regis and Kelly,” “Good Morning LA,” Hoda and Kathie Lee) and of course, the Kick Ass Clip of the Week. But occasionally, there are Gay Shows.

Again: “What does this have to do with that book you just finished reading?” Well, let’s suppose, first, that That’s What She Read is actually The Soup. Then we can look back at some of the titles I’ve read recently. And then, we can propose that, if A Decade of Curious People is the equivalent to “Chat Stew” and A Rogue’s Game is most definitely my version of “Chicks, Man.”, then A Single Man has to be, in its simplest form, “Gay Shows.”

The plot of A Single Man covers one day in the life of a man. It could be anybody, really, but Mr. Isherwood decided to talk about the being known as George:

Obediently, it washes, shaves, brushes its hair, for it accepts its responsibilities to the others. It is even glad that it has its place among them. It knows what is expected of it.

It knows its name. It is called George. [11]

George happens to be a professor at San Tomas Community College in a suburb of Los Angeles in 196…2? (It never comes out and says explicitly what year, but mentions are made of the Cuban Missile Crisis and communists, which, if I remember what little 20th Century American History I was taught, seem to predate the Kennedy assassination.) He teaches English literature (which almost makes sense, for George is British), and he also happens to be gay. George’s partner, Jim, also happened to have died recently, so he’s still dealing with his grief.

But really, the book isn’t about George being gay. (And there’s a section in A Single Man where George, as an English professor, starts thinking or talking about how books are about something, but I didn’t turn the page down and I’m too lazy to go find it now.) It’s about a middle-aged man getting through a single day. It just happens that some of the things that George has to deal with is homophobia and reaching out to a student who might also be gay.

Now, you wouldn’t think that after having seen or read synopses of Tom Ford’s recent adaptation of the novel. If, like me, you watched the movie first, you’d believe that the novel is all about being a gay man who lost his partner and how he deals with the survivor’s guilt, among other things. But it’s not. To me, it’s about so much more and yet, so much less than that at the same time.

I watched the movie first; then, being interested and thinking it would be similar, requested the book from my Local Library. And it is, in many ways: we focus on George the entire time (Colin Firth narrates key moments). George wakes up, goes to work, teaches a class, runs a few errands, comes home, has dinner with his girl friend/neighbor Charley, then goes out to a bar, runs into a student, goes skinny dipping with said student (don’t panic, college student, and they were drunk), he and student go back to his house but nothing happens, I said don’t panic, and then they go to bed, he in his bed, and the student on the couch. End of day.

The huge difference is: in the movie, George is extremely depressed. He still hasn’t gotten over the death of Jim, and he’s trying to cope, but not succeeding. His evening with the student ends up giving him hope for his life that he didn’t have at the beginning of the movie. In the novel, George seems a bit depressed in the morning, but becomes more optimistic and happy as the day goes on.

And I don’t want to give away the ending of either the book or the movie, because I enjoyed both and I think others will enjoy both as well, but I’m going to talk about it in very vague terms anyway. The ending is the same in both, but the ending felt earned in the novel, and seemed like a cruel twist of fate in the movie. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Uh, so in the end, this book is nothing like “Gay Shows.” on The Soup. Wow. Talk about letting a metaphor get away from oneself. Sorry ’bout that, folks.

Grade for A Single Man: 2 stars

Fiction: “Jitterbug Perfume” by Tom Robbins

It’s taken me just about two days two hours (if I hadn’t spread it out over two days) to compile all of the quotes I’d underlined and dogeared during the read, and now, I’m almost struggling to coalesce my thoughts into words that can be understood.’

I’m also kinda tired (just finished my second 4-12 shift at work, number 3 is … well, later today, as you’ll read this, and bonus! it’s sale markdown night!), so coherency may be an overstated goal right now.

Okay, enough blather.

Jitterbug Perfume is dense. The good kind of dense. It was about … oh, three weeks ago, and I had just finished reading Bound and Determined, and my good friend Sarah had pretty much poked me in the back and told me to read Decadent (“Alaina! There’s a line where the dude says, and I quote, ‘Fucking her ass, saving her life’! You HAVE TO READ THIS.” — Sarah), and what else had I been reading? Oh, Big Sleep, and I had picked up a couple of other books but thrown them down again because oh god, the Book ADD. Anyway, I was walking through Border’s with Amelia, and I was looking for books that were a bit denser than I had been used to – I wanted something meaty, and possibly, non-linear (now that I think about it, I think I picked this up after watching “The Candidate,” the really sad episode of Lost from this season, and it finally struck me that, oh god, Lost was ending).

SO ANYWAY. While I was in Border’s, I picked up another book by Tom Robbins, but when I got home, the urge to reread Jitterbug Perfume poked me.  I had read it years ago, and I remembered that I liked it, and I knew bits of the plot, but after reading a book five years ago, you can’t really relate the plot. So here’s the part where I try:

Fiction: “The Reader” by Bernhard Schlink

Considering this is the second book I’ve read that was recently made into a book starring Kate Winslet in less than a month, you may think I have a girl-crush on Kate Winslet. You’d be right, but this book has as much to do with Kate Winslet as her role in The Reader had to do with her winning the Oscar last month (oh please, we all know this was the “Oops, you should have won for everything else you’ve been nominated for” Make Up Award).

At the age of fifteen in post-WWII Germany, Michael Berg is struck down by hepatitis. He is helped by Hanna Schmitz when he falls ill in a side-street. He returns to her after his illness to thank her, and is struck by her simple beauty:

I remember that her body and the way she held it and moved sometimes seemed awkward. … It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world. It was the same obliviousness that weighted in her glance and her movements when she was pulling on her stockings. But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive — a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body.

They enter into an affair, with Hanna teaching him about sex and love.

Fiction: “Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates

For those that know me, you know that I consider myself to be a pop culture glutton.  You also know that, while I read a lot (the small number of books I’ve completed thus far in 2009 notwithstanding), I tend to choose my new books by jumping on a bandwagon.  For instance, why did I pick up Tess of the d’Urbervilles earlier this year?  Because Masterpiece Classic was airing an adaptation of it.  Why did I choose to read Twilight last summer?  Because all the young kids were doing it, and I turn 26 in a couple of weeks, and I’d like to still feel slightly relevant.  Why did I pick up Revolutionary Road?  Because it was supposed to be the role that won Kate Winslet her first, much-deserved Oscar.  Also, it was on the buy-one-get-one-half-off table at Borders.

The fact that the role of April Wheeler didn’twin Kate Winslet that golden little man doesn’t really matter at this point; she won for The Reader - which I currently have on loan from the Portland Public Library, so, see?  Bandwagon.

I was going to write a long, explanatory synopsis right now, but I’m … tired.  And honestly, you can look up the plot summary on Wikipedia.  Here — I’ll give you all a minute to go click that link and read what happens to Frank and April Wheeler, because in this particular entry, I don’t want to discuss plot — I want to discuss Other Things.  While you’re at that, you should also check out the plot summary for the film as well.

It’s fine; I’ll wait.