Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"The Walking Tour" by Kathryn Davis
The pastoral collides with cyberspace in a pulse-quickening novel that's totally confusing, but worth the trip.
By Virginia Heffernan
[12/02/99]

Interview
Games people play
"Double Down" authors Frederick and Steven Barthelme talk about family, gambling and their run-in with the legal system.
By Jim Hanas
[12/01/99]

Reviews
"In Nevada" by David Thomson, "24/7" by Andrés Martinez and "Double Down" by Frederick and Steven Barthelme
The harsh beauty of Nevada, the glitzy pleasures of Vegas and the thrill ride of gambling.
By Jeff Stark
[12/01/99]

Ivory Tower
Painting insanity black
Why are there more black schizophrenics?
By Annie Murphy Paul
[12/01/99]

Writer beware
Publishing that first novel often brings more terrors than thrills.
By Samantha Gillison
[11/30/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

On its most obvious level, of course, this exchange is little more than a tart allusion to the dying words of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz; yet something else is happening beneath this exchange -- something much larger, and much closer not only to Garland's novel's dark heart, I think, but to the heart of contemporary masculinity as well. The "horror" the ghost alludes to comes soon enough: The formerly high-minded backpackers in the commune tear the limbs and entrails from three corpses in a berserk bout of atavism, an event that Richard observes with the sort of cold detachment that one more typically applies to, say, a Fox documentary.

The television analogy seems particularly apt because there is a filmic distance to the proceedings, a sense that carnage like this occurs in movies and video games but not in the humdrum ragbag of real life. "What horror?" Richard pleads. Precisely: By the time we reach the novel's chilling last lines, we come to realize that Richard never got it. Even the most visceral of experiences has been reduced to something cinematically sterile: Richard is content with the Hemingwayesque cachet that he gleaned from the ordeal, his cool scars and his "thousand-yard stare."

This reminds me of a scene in Nick Hornby's glibly enjoyable "High Fidelity," a 1995 novel about the lovelorn fuck-ups of a London record-shop owner. Hornby's narrator, puzzled as to whether he enjoys the act of having sex or just the fact of having had sex, pines for a way of dodging an imminent coupling: "If there was a way of cheating, of circumnavigating the next bit -- getting Marie to sign some sort of affidavit which said I'd spent the night, for example -- I'd take it." Once again, the experience itself -- the fumbling present-tense sensation of it -- is reduced to a dry and meaningless husk, a nettlesome means to an end; and it calls to mind the uncertainty Neal Stephenson expresses in his new novel "Cryptonomicon," about whether it's possible to "have a serious experience anymore."

In the June/July 1999 issue of Men's Journal, under the rubric "MJ's Annals of Masculinity," a cartoon (drawn by P.S. Mueller) shows four species of American man -- oldster, aging hipster, square-jawed broker-type and a short toothy fellow who I must assume is intended to represent my own generation, which, for pesky want of an acceptable sobriquet, we'll call 20-something. The cartoon reads, "A Generational Thing," and above each specimen of man floats a thought balloon: "the war," muses our oldster; "the drugs," our ponytailed hipster; "the bucks," our '80s-ish broker; and, finally, from our youngster, "the stuff."

It's an interesting, if not very funny, cartoon. I'm curious, for one, about what delineates "stuff" from "bucks," besides the obvious: bucks is money, and stuff is ... stuff. Maybe cartoonist Mueller means gadgetry, snowboards, pet robots, things of that ilk; I don't know. But my suspicion is that he's alluding to the blasé sense of lazy excess that has enveloped my generation throughout the '90s -- the blithe and not entirely incorrect assumption that anything and everything is for sale (literally, but mostly figuratively, I mean).

That motif of collecting -- the lust for stuff taken to its nth degree -- appears in both "The Beach" and "High Fidelity." Says Richard of his travels, "I went about it in the same way as a stamp collector goes about collecting stamps, carrying around with me a list of all the things I had yet to see or do." Hornby's Rob claims something like a thousand record albums, most of them the sort of weepy music that bachelors play when they're feeling miserable and/or looking for an excuse to chain-smoke. His collection represents his sole accomplishment, as well as the supreme chronicle of his life. "I try to remember," he says, "the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography without having to do anything like pick up a pen."

Next page | Are non-ironic cojones possible anymore?