Index Full Of In-Jokes Which Most Readers Probably Skip Over

Hello all, I hope you had a lovely week. I’ve been busy getting lots of productive work done, like for instance taxes and buying real hanging file folders. I know I’m an adult now because I practically started salivating at the Container Store 🙃

Actually, I have been writing 1k words a day, and I’m now past 31k words on the latest draft, so maybe something like 2/5ths of the way there? But then, of course, yet another draft begins…

I’ve also been reading a lot, because of course I have. Partly that’s because I set a yearly goal to read 12 specific books, which include:

1. From Hell
2. Middlemarch
3. Infinite Jest (for its 30th anniversary, natch)
4. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
5. Little Women
6. Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
7. The Gormenghast trilogy
8. P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories
9. A novel by Nabokov (I picked Pale Fire)
10. A novel by Pynchon (I picked The Crying of Lot 49)
11. A novel by Murakami (no idea what I’ll pick, hit me up if you have opinions)
12. A novel by Toni Morrison (no idea what I’ll pick, hit me up if you have opinions)

This list may be… ambitious… given that Middlemarch, Infinite Jest, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are a thousand pages a piece. (There’s a reason I picked Pynchon’s shortest book by a country mile…) Also, I keep getting distracted with mere 500-page novels like Your Name Here (see below). But so far I’ve kept up, so we’ll see where I am in a couple months!

Anyway, I figured I’d talk about a few things I’ve read recently, since I haven’t done that in a bit. Don’t expect any kind of serious literary analysis here — this is just a brief newsletter; but maybe in the future?

First up: Pale Fire.

I have never read Lolita! Quelle surprise! It was never assigned in school and I just never, quite, got around to it. (I have, however, listened to Jamie Loftus’ fantastic Lolita Podcast about how the book has been (mis)interpreted over the years.) But despite Lolita’s greater stature in ~ the culture ~, Pale Fire is widely considered Nabokov’s masterpiece.

“Pale Fire” (in the context of the novel) is a short-ish, not-particularly-good poem in which the poet John Shade muses about his life and his daughter’s premature death. The bulk of the novel is the extensive footnotes, in which the poet’s friend and coworker Professor Kinbote explains the allusions but mostly just rambles about the king of his home country of Zembla. Eventually, of course, you start to think… hmm, maybe their relationship was not exactly what I thought.

This book! Is very good! But I also think it requires a certain level of familiarity with academic commentarial conventions which perhaps explains why I was over the moon for this novel and my book club was not so much. It’s a book that assumes you’ve read at least one extensively footnoted OUP World’s Classics edition or a literary companion (like, say, A Companion to the Crying of Lot 49…).

Some (spoilerific) things I loved about Pale Fire:

• The title! It’s never exactly spelled out, but it’s taken from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, and in context is about the moon’s “pale fire” being a theft of the sun’s light. Ironically, Kinbote complains about poets being too lazy to come up with a good title for their work, while himself attempting to co-opt the poem for his own purposes!
• “Pale Fire” the poem is, uh, not that good. But in the narrative of the novel that’s probably because Shade dies literally the day after he “finishes” it. Throughout the commentary, we’re introduced to snippets of alternative readings and we’re left wondering — would the poet have edited “Pale Fire” further? How far along was he in his work, really? But, as Kinbote mentions in the introduction, the commentators always get the last word 😉
• The relationship between Shade and Kinbote (and the “interference” of Shade’s wife) is uncomfortably toxic in just the right way. We all know that one person who has that one strange friend that they’re not, quite, able to cut off, and Pale Fire is probably the best portrayal of that relationship I’ve read. (The funniest scene in the novel is when Kinbote doesn’t receive an invite to Shade’s birthday, and decides to get back at him by… gifting him, via his wife, a copy of the volume of Proust where one character is snubbed from a party. This involves a full page of exposition to explain, and Shade’s wife is, understandably, just confused.)
• The novel has all these tiny blink-and-you-miss-it clues and puzzles that fit together neatly, in a really masterful way. Obviously Kinbote is the former king of Zembla; that’s basically text. But what’s more subtle is the real identity of Kinbote. There’s an index full of in-jokes, which most readers probably skip over. If you take the time to read it, you’ll find an otherwise-unexplained entry for a Professor Botkin, likely the mad Russian professor occasionally referenced in the text, as the butt of jokes at Shade’s college. But, of course, Botkin is a near-anagram of Kinbote — an interpretation all-but-confirmed by Nabokov.

Next up: Rusty Brown.

This was intended as a “popcorn read” by my book club, after Pale Fire. Obviously nobody realized that the LARB review of the book was titled “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?”.

Yep! Chris Ware still hates fun! A lesson I should have learned when I read Quimby Mouse.

Rusty Brown is (almost) unrelentingly bleak. (Almost) all of the stories are grim, depressing, misanthropic. Every time you feel a character might be redeemed, they are almost immediately unredeemed. All of the male characters are outright creeps, and the female characters generally aren’t much better.

The exception is the last story, where… well, let’s just say it might not have a happy ending, and it’s followed by an “intermission” title card, for a second volume that might take another 18 years to write — but it is cathartic.

Is Rusty Brown worth reading? I’m not sure (and, for the record, neither is Alan Jacobs). It’s so misanthropic that it feels unrealistic, in almost the same way A Little Life does — but the over-the-top, almost-comedic bleakness of A Little Life is rather the point of that novel. I get the sense Chris Ware actually believes that people are the worst.

But… it also has some of the best graphic design of any graphic novel I’ve ever read. The cradle-to-grave story of Jordan Lint III — starting with a disorganized jumble of geometric shapes as he resolves into consciousness — is just astonishing, even if it’s almost physically repulsive to read. I’m not sure I can recommend it, exactly, but if you’re a fan of the medium I do think you have to grapple with it.

You are reading a review of Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff. Wait, weren’t you just reading a newsletter? What’s even going on? Has this newsletter lost the plot?

No, I just read the new novel by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, so if you detect some DeWitticisms in this newsletter, you are definitely correct.

This is one of those novels that has a lot going on, as they say (whoever “they” are). There are at least five concurrent plotlines going on which are all completely unexplained and have to be pieced together from context:

1. A long chain of emails between Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff as they attempt to write Your Name Here together (with many references to Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Kaufman’s Adaptation)
2. A long chain of emails between reclusive author Rachel Zozanian and a globetrotting tabloid journalist called by various names but mostly Alyosha Pechorin, as they attempt to write a novel together
3. Various first-person sections from Zozanian and Pechorin as they attempt to deal with their money troubles / publishing industry troubles / disappointment in the other author / etc
4. Excerpts from Lotteryland, Zozanian’s award-winning first novel (in reality, an unpublished DeWitt novel), set in a Gilliam-esque alternate Britain in which everything is assigned by lottery
5. Excerpts from Hustlers, Zozanian’s semi-autobiographical second novel, about her time working as a prostitute to pay her way through Oxford
6. A series of second-person interludes (freely referencing Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler), primarily about a director and various actors attempting to make a film version of Lotteryland, while reading an in-universe version of Your Name Here which is an airport bookstore bestseller written by an in-universe Helen DeWitt to popularize learning the Arabic language in the wake of the War on Terror

The novel itself was mostly written around 2006 (hence the references to the War on Terror) and floated around as a pay-what-you-want PDF on DeWitt’s website for two decades before a publisher finally picked it up. It more-or-less assumes you’re familiar with who DeWitt is and the axe she has to grind with the publishing industry; I can’t imagine anyone getting much out of this novel without at least first reading The Last Samurai and a profile or two of DeWitt, given a major theme of the novel is to analyze the distinction between writer and character, between person and persona (Zozanian isn’t DeWitt, but she’s not not DeWitt either).

Now, I am a huge fan of The Last Samurai. I am a huge fan of The English Understand Wool. I am less a fan of Lightning Rods (though I did enjoy it), and I think Some Trick is bad and shouldn’t have been published in its current form. So I strongly suspected I’d love this novel, but I was worried.

I loved this novel, but my worries were also correct. This is a very, very difficult novel to recommend — certainly nothing like The Last Samurai, where I will happily shove it in the hands of anyone that will listen — but it’s also brilliant. There’s so many DeWitticisms that have infected my brain (“the brain is not clever”, “you’re lucky just being you”, “drinks Bitburger”, and a single line that’s probably the hardest I’ve laughed in a year, all thanks to a particular typographical trick. You’ll know it when you see it.) However, it’s also a bit of a slog — I don’t love Gridneff’s wacky misspelled emails as much as DeWitt or her in-universe stand-ins do — and that’s difficult when the book is 500 pages. But if you can stomach it — if you’re a huge fan of The Last Samurai — then this is a worthy follow-up.

But I do somewhat wish the entirety of Lotteryland is published at some point. I need more Gilliam-esque alternate Britain in my life.

And then, I read Pynchon. (Conveniently, given, as James Selkins points out, his influence on Your Name Here.)

Pynchon has a reputation for being an obtuse, hard-to-follow, hard-to-read novelist, and while that may be true for his longer novels, I definitely didn’t find that to be true for The Crying of Lot 49. He uses elevated, careful diction, yes, but it’s nevertheless eminently readable — Lot 49 is a masterpiece of careful, mellifluous word choice defusing any potential confusion from paragraph-long sentences. It’s really beautiful prose!

Now, I do understand why some people are turned off by the plot. Bored housewife Oedipa Maas learns that she’s the co-executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a multimillionaire former lover. She drives down California to the fictional LA suburb of San Narciso and immediately starts an affair with her other co-executor. Then, she almost immediately starts losing her mind, as Inverarity’s estate seems to be linked in mysterious ways to “the Tristero”, which may (or may not) be a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of postal monopolies. (Or, it may just be a giant put-on.) Oedipa bounces around from one picaresque adventure to another — palling around one of Inverarity’s high-end suburban developments and contacting the inventor of a possible perpetual motion machine and spending an entire chapter describing the plot of a pseudo-Shakespearean drama — as her paranoia slowly starts to envelop her.

It’s a very, very Russellcore book.

It has multi-page-long exposition of Maxwell’s Demon and the connection between information and entropy. It has a made-up Puritan sect from the English Civil War and prominently features the Thurn-und-Taxis postal monopoly of the Holy Roman Empire. It starts as a light-hearted, indeed frivolous, comedy, and slowly devolves into paranoia that there might be something, vaster than any of us understand, hidden just out of sight, as the ominous muted-posthorn symbol and acronym W.A.S.T.E. start appearing everywhere. It has long stretches of beautiful prose to say, basically, “Oedipa was feeling nostalgic.” I loved it. I loved loved loved loved it. But I also suspect most people I recommend it to will be put off by it. Oh well — at 150 short pages, it’s worth a try.

Recently a friend asked me if I was an “oakloh kid”. I had to ask what they meant three times, because I had no idea what they meant, but I eventually worked out that they were talking about French underground musician Oklou.

I was not, at the time, an Oklou kid. So I dutifully looked up her first full-length LP, choke enough, and uh that was a week ago and I’ve listened to the entire album at least 3 times a day since then so I guess I’m an Oklou kid now. She combines some of the best downtempo production I’ve ever heard with Broadcast-style word-salad tone poetry and the result is intoxicating.

Meanwhile, the new Underscores album U is out. It took me probably three full listens to really get into it, so I recommend giving it time. But the main reason I’m including it here is a San Francisco fun fact: the album cover is a cartoon take on Stonestown Galleria!!

Alright, I’m off to Chicago for a week. Next missive in T-minus one week.