Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Plowing the Dark (2000) by Richard Powers.

In brief: Like a mural of epic ambition, the breadth of the novel’s ingenuity only reveals itself once appreciated in its entirety. The journey, which connects virtual reality research to the global social upheaval of the late 1980s, is a tandem of madness and reward. As a commentary on representational art and how it may shape reality, there is little that can equal the richness of Powers’ composition—but the sensory definition of the prose is so overwhelming, it is easy to drown before ever reaching the conclusion.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Plowing the Dark, keep reading below.)

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Michael Chabon enthusiasts have had plenty to be excited about of late. Not long ago, Chabon became the rarest of authors to be nominated for a Nebula, a Hugo and an Edgar for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union—a book that I didn’t find as sweeping as his magnum opus, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but stands nonetheless as the apotheosis of his recent efforts to tear down the walls of Genre like it’s ’89 in Berlin (as well as a thumping good detective thriller sprinkled with a healthy metaphoric dose of chess). Then it was announced that the film adaptation is in the hands of none other than the Brothers Coen, a dream pairing of filmmakers and source material if I ever saw one. And then the the draft screenplay that Chabon wrote for Spider-Man 2 hit the Web, finally revealing the extent of his contributions to the film, which were largely what I thought they were (Peter Parker the struggling pizza delivery boy—that sort of thing).

As I write this, I’m leafing through the newly released Maps and Legends, the first collection of Chabon’s literary essays in book form. (The bookshop stocked it in a shrinkwrap to protect Jordan Crane’s ornate three-piece jacket design—a boon for people like me who prefer to keep their books in impeccable condition, but perhaps unsuitable for browsing purposes.) Some of it is familiar to me: among the selections are his Eisner Awards keynote about the decline of children’s comics, his reflections on writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and my favourite, an expanded version of his 1997 essay on a bafflingly anachronistic Yiddish phrasebook that not only provided the inspiration for the contemporary Jewish Sitka of TYPU‘s alternate universe, but (hitherto unbeknownst to me) generated a stir of controversy on a Yiddish-language mailing list.

The other selections are quite refreshing; thankfully, they offer a lot more variety than a simple retread of Chabon’s position that serious fiction has dug itself into a hole as a consequence of relegating “entertaining” genres into other holes—though that, too, gets plenty of attention in the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”. There is an excursion into one of the iconic moments of Chabon’s personal mythos (the abandonment of his would-be second novel, Fountain City), a piece that exalts Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his mastery of nesting lies within lies along Holmes’ pursuit of the truth, and many a word about the storyteller as both Golem-maker and trickster figure (or Coyote, if you will). The connections to Chabon’s fiction should be obvious to those familiar with his works (respectively, in the preceding sentence: Wonder Boys, The Final Solution, Kavalier & Clay, Summerland), though I imagine the essays stand alone quite admirably. I haven’t read the whole collection, mind you: I deliberately skipped the piece on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as McCarthy’s jaunt into the well-travelled post-apocalypse resides high on my reading list untouched.

I was immediately drawn, as I would be, to Chabon’s essay on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Before I proceed, I should say that the very thought of Chabon writing about Pullman is almost as exciting to me as Watterson writing about Schulz, which, if you’ll remember, I favourably compared to Beethoven writing about Bach. That said, I come not to praise Chabon (I swear!), though I’m not exactly going to bury him, either.

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Rachel Donadio has written a superb essay in The New York Times Book Review on literary dealbreakers, disparities in literary taste that spell doom for a relationship. As should be obvious to my regular readers, I fully agree that this is an acceptable standard that brooks no compromise, much like how many out there hold their partners to far sillier criteria like religion.

Need I name my dealbreakers, Dan Brown?

I find it a stimulating exercise, however, to ponder the problem in the inverse: the dealbreaker involving a book that a potential (but alas, only potential) companion fails to like. And come to think of it, on this account I can be quite forgiving—knowing, as I do, that I am a reader of profoundly omnivorous interests whose favourite novels hail from genres or aesthetic movements that virtually never intersect.

But if I had to pick one? Well, I wouldn’t even consider getting involved with someone who doesn’t appreciate The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A candlelight dinner with the sort of young lady blind to Mark Haddon’s whimsical celebration of genius—be it the intrigue of its Holmesian bravado, the incalculable charm of chapters numbered in primes (oh la la!), or simply hating France—is, frankly, two wasted hours better spent re-reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

The final debating competition of my undergraduate career ended much the same way as the previous National Championship I’d attended: with a cosmic phenomenon for sad and lucky eyes. This time, it happened at the end of a stroll along the perimeter of the Halifax Citadel with an entourage of my fellow prairie kids, bellies full of seafood one and all. And while it wasn’t a festival of colours like that aurora from above, consider this: posing for a dockside photograph with Theodore Tugboat was not the highlight of the evening.

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Just shy of three weeks ago, I stayed at the decidedly unhygienic Ambassador City Jomtien, which was by all appearances Thailand’s number one tourist destination for indulgent Russian oligarchs. It was timely, then, that when I endeavoured to head to the beach for a spot of reading under the palms, the next book in my endless queue was none other than The Brothers Karamazov.

This was my first time through Dostoevsky’s magisterial opus, and at more than one juncture I observed that with its high moral intrigue, impassioned cast of players and unreserved Biblical ambition—not to mention the best courtroom speeches in prose fiction (themselves capable satires of psychoanalytic narrative analysis decades before the study formally existed)—surely somebody has had the bravado to attempt a film.

As it turns out, Richard Brooks wrote and directed an English-language film adaptation back in 1958 (read the contemporaneous New York Times review) starring—get this—Yul Brynner and William Shatner. For those of you with access to Turner Classic Movies, it plays 7 February.