My Big Fat Big Brother Addiction

It's that time of the year again -- and once again, I'm hooked. I know, I know; "Big Brother" is the dumbest show in America and people who watch Reality TV are no better than the saps who participate in it -- it reduces us all to the level of exhibitionists and voyeurs, it pushes the land of the free that much closer to the mouth of hell. I agree completely -- but you're talking to the wrong person. This is, I shamefully admit, my favorite show, and the one program in the world I would not dream of missing. I can channel-surf and bypass my favorite writer on "Charlie Rose." I can hear someone I know personally on the radio and say "Maybe another time" as I click off. I can hear my very name whispered in passing by a stranger and maybe -- just maybe -- not care. But when "Big Brother" comes on, I'm there, usually with a pizza.

How bad is this addiction? Well, this is the fourth season and I didn't miss a single show of the previous three. I remember most of the names of everyone who participated -- total non-entities and thoroughly undeserving wannabe celebrities whose unfunny jokes, personal quirks, nasty habits, unseemly revelations and painfully watchable meltdowns are permanently inscribed in my memory. I remember Karen (Season One) going apeshit over how much she hates her husband. I remember Nicole (Season Two) feeling up Will in the hot tub with her feet. I remember Chiara kissing Lisa (Season Three). I hope to remember this year's Michelle doing something that will haunt her the rest of her days.

There is nothing defensible about any of this, so I may as well stop apologizing -- stop whining and just, you know, work through my addiction, get to the root of the problem, try to figure not only why total idiots fascinate me, but why -- why, Good Lord, why -- I actually kind of dream of joining this cruel form of entertainment, forming alliances, revealing things that will come back to hurt me, and wrecking my life in, oh, so many, many ways. The money, I am sad to report, wouldn't be the spur. I think there's just a complete total fucking self-destructive moron deep inside my soul that is fighting to come out, that needs, nay, even deserves to have his day in court.

Until that day, I will trust these twelve others -- well, eleven now, as Scott (Season Four) abruptly split last night -- to do the work for me. I'm putting three hours a week in your hands, guys. Don't let me down. Go out there and hurt each other.

Addenda to Berger's Best Friends: I didn't mention it in my review -- because you can clot a small review with only so many references -- that Berger's novel also reminded me of Blake's "A Poison Tree," a poem that has always much impressed me: it reflects the way resentment or bitterness can eventually assume a shape, a deceptive though no less lethal shape.


A Poison Tree
William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.


And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.


And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,


And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.

I don't know -- maybe it's just me: with every new book, I feel I'm getting dumber than I was even a few years ago. Around 1999 or so I read Elective Affinities, and as is so often the case didn't really feel I'd understood it, so I read it again. Recently the Berger book made me think of it so I started it again, mostly to see if my memory was true or false. I've been mostly just stumbling through it; it seems like it should be easier by now, but it's such a strange book -- it's a craggy kind of book. Goethe chews on ideas so much they seem to get stuck in his teeth; either that or I'm just missing the depth of what he's saying half the time, and what's scary is that he might not be saying anything all that terribly complex. That dread "second reading" feeling (actually that would be a fourth reading) is nigh upon me; like I should now attack it yet again, spear in hand, driving my poky white steed through its slim pages. Nah -- I'll resist the urge. I'm all outfitted with the Norman Rush books. I'll move on to them.

Destructive Affinities

Best Friends by Thomas Berger. Simon and Schuster. 209 pages. $24.00

"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible." So wrote Henry Adams, that great sourpuss of American letters. This may be a little too optimistic for Thomas Berger, who has always had a special talent for darkly comic novels of suburban anomie. His classic in this regard is the 1980 Neighbors, where staid, middle-aged Earl Keese finds himself locked in a power struggle with the kinky couple who move in next door. Berger isn't cynical about the possibility of people getting along; you might say he's both fatalist and moralist, sympathetic to the people caught in the catastrophes he so neatly arranges for them, but not particularly merciful about their fates. (Poor Earl. One still remembers his dying gasp.)

Berger has written about a great many things in a career that spans over 40 years, but his latest puts him back on familiar turf. It's not perfect; there are occasional sentences that come off as either overworked or stiff, and his casual, tossed-off observations can seem more annoying than apt. But this twenty-second novel by one of the few American writers who can be called "seriously funny" is a bit like one of the many classic cars that are part of the story’s environment; it has its idiosyncrasies, but there's no denying the elegance of its design or the sheer power of its performance. It delivers a smooth ride -- right over the precipice, as only Berger can.

Outside of the fact that they're both 33-year-old trust fund babies and pals for 20 years, Roy Courtland and Sam Grandy have little in common on the surface. They're the typical odd couple, slob and snob. Roy is handsome and single, a health nut whose main obsessions are beautiful women and beautiful cars. Sam is obnoxious, grossly overweight, and a sucker for fancy gadgets he can't operate. He's also married to Kristin, who is way too pretty for him, and who doesn't much care for Roy -- friends being somewhat more forgiving of excesses than wives are. Roy and Sam are honest with each other as only friends can be; Roy thinks even their occasional lies show how close they are, since lying to a best friend is "the next best thing to lying to oneself."

While Roy piddles around selling "vintage high performance" cars that no one can afford, Sam doesn't work at all; his care and feeding is left up to Kristin, an up and coming manager at a local bank branch and a gourmet chef at home. Sam has also blown most of his inheritance on newfangled toys and bad investments, and continually hits up Roy for loans he has no intention of repaying. Roy and Kristin are Sam's co-dependents, and Roy in particular prides himself on being tolerant, good-natured, and loyal.

But Roy, the main character of the book, is also a fake; a deluded narcissist and a needy loner. He rhapsodizes about how much he loves the women he seduces, when actually all he really wants is an easy way in and an easier way out. He connects with Sam because Sam sees through him -- as do most of the women he dates, eventually -- and he can't connect with anyone else except his classic autos, which he prefers to think have a "soul." Roy is a perfect example of what he hates in his married lover, Francine: solipsism, the belief that nothing is real but one's self. In fact, all three major characters are less at home with people than with the objects of their own little worlds: Sam with his cappuccino machine and microbrewed beer, Roy with his three-liter drophead coupes, and Kristin with her salmon fillets and julienned fennel.

Cozy and reliable as the friendship seems to be, there are fissures in it, and two successive events set the course of implosion: Sam has a heart attack and winds up in the hospital, and Francine gets killed by her husband in a murder-suicide. With no one to turn to, Roy finds himself seeking solace from Kristin, who actually begins to like him; Roy as a person is different from "Sam's idea of you, which is really different," she hints darkly, "maybe more different than you expect." When Sam claims bankruptcy and begs for a massive loan, Roy's loyalties are torn between his feckless pal and his pal's sensible wife, forcing him to question just how his friendship with Sam started and what has sustained it for so long. The closer Roy gets to Kristin, the more ulterior Sam's motives begin to seem, raising questions about his own. Are these two men who swear there's no competition between them actually in a lifelong battle to get on each other's nerves and, eventually, finish the other one off?

Berger is not the type of writer who usually brings Goethe to mind, but the relationships in Best Friends made me think constantly of Elective Affinities, that strange expository novel of Teutonic romanticism. Goethe compared people to chemical agents that naturally attract or oppose, sometimes attracting in spite of opposition because of their mutual relationship with a third; one character in Goethe's novel cites the example of oil and water joined by alkaline salt. Roy and Kristin are at odds with each other at some level because they feel proprietary toward Sam, but he is also their common financial and psychological burden who takes advantage of both and keeps either from getting what he or she wants. Similarly, Roy and Sam each have something the other wants; Roy wants Kristin and Sam wants money, and Kristin is their "common opponent" -- she stops Roy from giving money to Sam, and while she'll sleep with Roy, she won't divorce Sam to marry him. Berger delicately traces all the twists and turns of a menage that promises everything and only delivers its opposite, continually jacking up the emotional ante.

"There are times when all choices must, as if by divine law, be disastrous," Roy thinks at one point, quickly consoling himself by saying those things only happen in "works of the imagination." The joke, of course, is that Roy is a character in such a work, but the point is that in both art and life personal and natural disasters do have a shape, a history, and a malefic destiny. For Roy and Sam, no bond of loyalty becomes stronger than the bond of mutually assured destruction.

This deceptively "light" and easy read digs into the hidden recesses of friendship with a remarkably subtle touch. At 79, Berger still nails the passive-aggressiveness of modern life like no other writer alive.

"If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares." -- William Gibson on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in Today's Times.

Happy 100th, George.

Girl in Cool Beans: she looks like Bonnie in the old "Trots and Bonnie" cartoon that used to appear in National Lampoon. Gangly, cropped blonde hair, pulldown knit cap on her head. She's in love with the dream of being a writer. Aren't they all. She's looking at her laptop and reading aloud her story to a long-haired freckled friend, who approvingly nods at all the key points and even high-fives her once, saying "That's beautiful! Keep it!" Encouraged, Bonnie reads her favorite parts. "This is the description of Simon," she says. "This is good." She reads something I can't completely hear and then says: "I love Simon." She resumes typing and her friend resumes writing hastily in her journal.

The thought occurred to me while driving home: as dystopias go, I think Dostoevsky's Demons is more impressive than 1984. Orwell had a model to go on, the Soviet Union, while Doestoevsky basically foresaw the horror of the Soviet Union before it even got off the ground, based largely on the mid-19th century outbreak of Nihilism. Surely Orwell read Dostoevsky's book -- could it have influenced him? Maybe, maybe. Could be interesting to compare the two.

Speaking of which, all the way through reading Best Friends I kept thinking of Goethe's Elective Affinities. Don't know why exactly, except that both books are about the arrangement of variables in which people are drawn to each other. In the Berger novel, a man and his best friend's wife are drawn to each other, mainly because the best friend is out of the picture, and the two, who had previously disliked one another, are now liberated from seeing each other exclusively through the eyes of the absent party. Berger has written such a great novel abouut friendship -- about all the deceit and repressed spite it involves -- and he manages to do it in such a light sort of way. It is lethally light, as only he can be. Jamesian scrutiny and a sureness of touch that is pure Berger. I need to sit down and just wrap my head around it.

Sent my thoughts on the Pynchon/Orwell connection to David Kipen of the San Francisco Chronicle, who had written a recent article on Pynchon's piece on 1984. He responds:

good catch, rodney. i hadn't seen atwood's piece, but that's pretty shameless of her. unless the insight isn't original to pynchon, and they're both paraphrasing an old idea. as a dyed-in-the-wool pynchonian, i don't really believe this, but it'd be fun to ask a dedicated orwellian to confirm just how fresh the oceania-lived-happily-ever-after hypothesis really is..

Somewhere down below I note that Thomas Pynchon's Guardian article on 1984 suggests that the past tense of the book's Appendix "suggests that Big Brother is in the past."

Here is Pynchon's quote:

... from its first sentence, 'The Principles of Newspeak' is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past. . . . In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps 'The Principles of Newspeak' serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending -- sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.

Margaret Atwood makes exactly the same point in a recent Guardian article on Orwell:

However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.

Think she read Pynchon first?

Yesterday morning I spent a fair amount of time with several stories by Hawthorne: "The Gentle Boy," "The Seven Vagabonds," and "The Canterbury Pilgrims." The best of the lot was the first, about a Quaker child taken in by a Puritan family after his father has been martyred by the community.

Hawthorne is a great writer but he's hard to stay with; the floridity gets burdensome and tends to wear a reader down. My history with him has always been that way; I pick up a book of his stories, read a few, and then am put off from looking at him again for weeks. With Melville, even when he's thrashing around, I find myself wanting to forge ahead, trusting that things will eventually get better -- maybe not this chapter, but the next one; maybe not even this book, but the next. I have more faith in Melville than in Hawthorne. And while Hawthorne's stories can crank up pretty good, they don't always have great endings. Still, I do retain an affection for Hawthorne; same with Poe, eventhough I often find myself saying a lot against both. They are props who have been there from the beginning.

I finished Redburn last week and liked it pretty well. It's B+ Melville, I'd say; a much "easier" read than Mardi, if not quite as illuminating. Redburn is, as Melville's books sometimes are, episodic. It's a tale of innocence meeting experience: the story of a naive, clean-living, pure of heart young man who takes to sea and has a lot of his romantic idealism knocked out of him. It is full of detailed and generally absorbing observations of life on sea and -- when the ship docks for six weeks in Liverpool, heart of the "middle passage" slave trade -- land. After 200 pages, you wonder when some kind of story is going to take off. But the observations are the story; it's a catalogue of cruelties on land and sea. Besides the sailor Wellingborough Redburn, the major character aboard the ship is a vicious, hateful old bastard named Jackson. He's a kind of Iago: godless, hellbent, mean for the sake of it. On land, Redburn falls in with a feckless dandy named Harry, who comes to no good; biographers such as Elizabeth Hardwick see in these passages some possible suggestion expression of Melville's own homosexual experience, which is credible, I suppose. In Redburn's travels throughout Liverpool, trying to follow an outdated guidebook of his father's, he is observant of slavery and wretched poverty -- the most touching scene in the book is one where he sees a helpless mother with two children and a dead infant in her arms. The Melville headnote in the Norton anthology I used in college said the the book was really about man's inhumanity to man. Their guess is as good as mine.

Also finished re-reading Best Friends, taking notes all the way through. More on that later.

In the realm of life, my number one goal is the proper management of printed matter, of which there is entirely too much.