Hundred Book Challenge #7: "Falconer" by John Cheever

“Falconer” is a hard story to describe. At it's base, it's the story of Ezekiel Farragut who is in prison for murdering his brother but so much more and so so so much less. 

If I read online summaries of this book I can see I'm not alone in having a tough time explaining what this book was about. Some people say Farragut learns to love again in prison because he has a relationship with a fellow prisoner... but the thing is that bit isn't any more prominent than any of the other bits. I could have just said, for example, that the book is about how Farragut is trying to get a diamond from a fellow prisoner in order to complete a homemade radio.

I think it's fair to say this book is sort of a stream of consciousness but a bit more accessible... call it a primer to “Ulysses.”

This story had me thinking about this report that reading literary fiction improves empathy. I like to think that's true because I read a lot of literary fiction and I'd like to have something to look down my nose about.

Anyway, does all this reading make me more empathetic?

From Scientific American:

Popular fiction tends to portray situations that are otherworldly and follow a formula to take readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and exciting experiences. Although the settings and situations are grand, the characters are internally consistent and predictable, which tends to affirm the reader’s expectations of others. It stands to reason that popular fiction does not expand the capacity to empathize.

Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships. “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations,” Kidd says. This genre prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues. This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom. Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.

So, “Falconer” has no real storyline. All it does is follow this fellow though prison. There are no real character transformation, no real protagonist, no real conflict or any of that business. The character of Farragut is far from likeable but, yes, I found myself empathizing with him.

There is one particularly unusual passage I'll relate to you here... the buildup to this is a bit convoluted but suffice to say Farragut's boyfriend is looking to escape when a visiting cardinal comes, but then it rains and the cardinal may cancel the visit... here is the line:

“The naked man was worried. If it rained there would be no escape, no cardinal, no nothing. Have pity upon him, then; try to understand his fears.”

This is literally the only time the narrator breaks the fourth wall. It was so stark and shocking that, yes, I obeyed what he did. It was crazy and it worked. I almost started crying for this character for whom I couldn't think of any real redeeming characteristics.

You know, this is how literature can be a bit transgressive. It's not about rooting for the villain, it's about realizing that the construct of hero and villain is false. If the villains are not villains then the heroes are not heroes and so much of how we want to see the world falls apart, but what is then constructed in its place is something that allows for more empathy. You don't have to love someone to understand them or pity them.

Of course, all this empathy can cause, at least in me, even more frustration with people around me. People who are so blind to the world that even something a stupidly petty as a political party or a favorite football team is enough to demonize “the other.”

Of course it all falls apart there because I then realize I'm not empathizing with these people who frustrate me.

Well... this is only the seventh book in the Hundred Book Challenge so maybe when I get to the end I'll be all sorts of empathetic- even for people who drive me crazy for their lack of empathy. 

Hundred Book Challenge #6: "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" by John Le Carre

It's the anti James Bond or Jason Borne.

We tend to romanticize spies but in the end they are just professional liars.

Recently, I started questioning why we make heroes out of certain groups of people based on occupation. Solders, police, fire fighters and spies. Maybe it's some sort of fantasy. There are some things to say about these people- they do save lives.

Still when you look into the lives of these people you come to the depressing realization that they are just normal people and that is kind of bad thing because you don't want these people to be normal. You want them to be better than that.

My time as a reporter showed me that police, solders and fire fighters are not special people. They make stupid human mistakes like everyone the only thing is their stupid mistakes can ruin people's lives.

In “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” We see Leamas, a British operative in charge of handling all the double agents from East Germany shortly after the building of the Berlin Wall, but they are being discovered and killed so Leamas is told to become a double agent himself by effectively ruining his life and reputation to the point where the communists come to him.

To say more would be spoilers but this story is full of twists and turns and I honestly didn't know how it would end until I read the last paragraph. Without giving much away (in other words... spoilers) you don't know if Leamas will live or die and, more to the point, which would be worse.

There isn't action or adventure in this book. Instead we get an accurate portrait of the moral inexactness of Cold War era spying and government in general.

To quote the protagonist, “What do you thing spies are: Priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”

There is no good side or bad side here. London, representative of Christians, Capitalism and freedom is just as guilty of atrocity to the world in general and to poor old Leamas specifically as the Communists.

Do the ends justify the means or does that question even mean anything? It's hard to say.

Ironically, this story led me into the cold. After I finished reading it, at about 1:30 in the morning as I sat up next to my sleeping wife, I couldn't sleep for several more hours. It left me shaken and empty, but in that movement it was more successful than any spy story I've encountered. Emotional movement is probably the key to any proper story and as such I appreciate the experience.

I'll have a real hard time enjoying any James Bond films now though. 

Hundred Book Challenge #5: "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chanler

… but who killed the chauffeur?

“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler is the first of the Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective novels.

I was about to say that if we ignore Dickens' “Bleak House” and the Sherlock Holmes stories... and some Poe and King and Christine I had no experience with detective novels before reading this. Obviously the fact that I've read all these others, including the fantastic Mrs. Marple books by Christine, I have quite a few detective novels under my belt. Still, “The Big Sleep” felt different. And for good reason, but I'll get to that in a bit. 

One side effect of this entire Hundred Book Challenge is the fact that I'm going to walk away from it with about a hundred thousand more books to read. After going through “The Big Sleep” I will have to read the other seven-odd novels that star this hard-living, hard-drinking detective.

Here's the thing: Marlowe isn't very cool. He is smart and almost every lady that comes across him tries to get him in bed, but he turns them away with a terse remark before going to a bar to drink and then going home to be alone. He seems to be constantly on the edge of falling into a deep depression. He is smart, but that intelligence alienates him from people. He is alone. He plays chess by himself. He drinks and drinks and drinks.

The story starts out as Marlowe is given a seemingly simple case: He is asked by a dying old rich man to figure out who is blackmailing one of his two wild daughters. Things spiral out of control into the seedy underbelly of 1930s Los Angeles complete with pornography, illegal gambling, murder, sex, betrayal and all the rest.

The story is pretty tight and the outcome is satisfying, but the mystery and the intrigue is not what makes this story run. That's where the chauffeur comes in. In a somewhat smaller story point a chauffeur dies. I try to follow these stories closely but at the end I couldn't figure out who was suppose to have killed him. I turned to the Internets and discovered that no one knows.

Here, I quote from Wikipedia:

In the case of "The Big Sleep", there is the famous question of who killed the chauffeur. When Howard Hawks made his film of the novel, the writing team were perplexed as to the answer. Hawks contacted Chandler to inquire and Chandler replied he had no idea. This exemplifies a difference between Chandler's style of crime fiction and previous authors. For Chandler the plot was almost secondary; what really mattered was the atmosphere and the characters. An ending that answered all the questions and neatly wrapped every plot thread up was less important to Chandler than having interesting characters who behave in believable ways.

Think about that for a second. It's like the polar opposite of most stories out there. Characters are stock and serve to forward plot. It's such a part of popular fiction that when it somewhat unnerving when we are presented with something different and more realistic.

Hard-boiled detectives are suppose to be cool, smooth characters not almost-broken men held together by a shaky morality and cheep whiskey. Much of his character building has been parodied and copied to death to the point where it's hard to remember this is one of the great originals.

Though it does play on my mind still. Who killed the chauffeur. Even though I know there is no answer the insidious little post-post-post modern dweeb inside me who scours the internet for story plot holes I can pull out when I want to be smarmy to my friends wish I knew just who killed the chauffeur. I suppose another point of the Hundred Book Challenge is to kill that guy and replace him with the guy who insists his friends read all these books he knows deep down they'll never ever read. Such is the life of a bookish person.

Maybe that's why Marlowe is so alone?

A couple of housekeeping things about this blog:

First, things have been a big sparse here lately. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what sort of blog this will be. Also, with my wife almost ready to burst with baby my mind has been on other things. Still, I'm not quitting here. Stick with me through the growing pains.

Second, I realize some time has gone by between my last Hundred Book Challenge entry and this one. I am still reading like crazy however. I am nearly complete with the 12-novel series “A Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell that Time Magazine considers one novel. If anything I've upped my reading time to include more things. After I get through that behemoth things will get a bit more regular.