Five Books For A Saturday

It would be a long Saturday, admittedly

More than a few readers have asked me for some kind of cross between These Are A Few Of My Favorite Books and These Are The Books I Would Recommend To Readers Of Avoidable Contact. Who am I to say no? We’ll start in my distant past; these are all books I read in my late teens and early twenties that would serve to fold, bend, spindle, and mutilate my authorial self.

There’s a link with each book: it’s an Amazon affiliate shortlink. I’m doing this solely out of laziness on my part, to make sure that you don’t wind up with a book of the same title by another author. Unless you have a real affinity for Amazon and/or e-books, if you’re interested in buying any of these books I would recommend closing your Amazon browser, going on Abebooks.com, and ordering a nice solid early hardcover edition. It’s unlikely to cost you any more and now you own something that you could give to a child, or a friend.

Alright. Let’s set the wayback machine for 1992. There’s young Jack, in his greasy off-campus apartment, cooking up a JTM hamburger patty and tossing on a slice of store-brand cheese. His one-of-a-kind Badd&Co. BMX bike is in the corner; there’s a stainless steel Colt Gold Cup Series 80 on the table, pulled apart so he can fuss with the crummy handwound trigger spring again. He has one class left in the day then he can leave his girlfriend behind and head over to “Coasters”, the infamous set of dirt jumps in Middletown, Ohio. There’s a stack of books on the floor next to his bed. And they are…

Couples, by John Updike

By all rights, this should be one of Updike’s worst productions. It’s a thinly veiled roman a clef about all the suburban chicks he knocked off in the process of setting fire to his first marriage. The protagonist, Piet (“rhymes with indiscreet,” a female character suggests) Hanema, is the worst Marty Stu ever conceived by a National Book Award winner. (Well, at least until that pansexual moron Chabon got into the game.) To read Couples is to perpetually be in a state of disbelief that a carpenter with a high school education could possibly be this witty, this quick to respond, this broadly aware.

Freddy spoke solemnly, trying to be precise. “You are a paradox. You’re a funny fellow. A long time ago, when I was a little boy studying my mommy and my daddy, I decided there are two kinds of people in the world: A, those who fuck, and, B, those who get fucked. Now the funny thing about you, Petrov, is that you think you’re A but you’re really B.”

“And the funny thing about you,” Piet said, “is you’re really neither.”

Oh, and I did I mention that he wrote it with the transparent intent of becoming a millionaire by selling it to Hollywood, something that went on to happen exactly as he’d hoped? No matter. Couples is the Updike book to read if you can only read one. I went through it the first time when I was seventeen and have read it more than a dozen times since. You get a different perspective every time. Recommended without reservation.

The Silent Cry, Oe Kenzaburo

This has a well-deserved reputation for being a difficult, bitter book to read. I certainly found it to be so, even though I’d prepared by reading Oe’s A Personal Matter beforehand. Both of these books involve parents with brain-damaged children; this was drawn directly from Oe’s struggle to raise a mentally crippled child in Japanese society.

The plot, which has a lot to do with a vigorous younger brother who tries to restore the fighting spirit of a village under the de facto command of a Chinese grocery-store owner in the year 1860, is almost besides the point. This is a gorgeously translated novel of sorrow, emotion, humiliations, and life at rock bottom. Unlike with Couples, I’ve only read this twice, the last time in 1997. Yet I can still remember the vast majority of it. A masterclass in emotive writing.

Count Zero, William Gibson

Due to impatience on my part and incompetence on the part of my local bookstore, I received (and read) this before Gibson’s brilliant and nearly perfect Neuromancer, the book to which Count Zero is a very loose sequel. Well, Neuromancer is a more important book, a more wide-ranging book, and an absolute must-read for any man who likes “cyberpunk” — but Count Zero is a tidier, cleaner, better-written effort. Most science fiction authors profess admiration for Neuromancer even as they are stealing entire scenes from Count Zero. Heck, one of the horrible recent Bond films (Skyfall) commits broad-spectrum larceny on Gibson’s sophomore cyberpunk novel.

Pretty much every modern dystopian book that posits open warfare between corporations also steals wholesale from Count Zero, and never as well as the original. Gibson’s twin fascinations of weaponry and fabric quality (I shit you not) are also fully on display here. It’s a lot of fun.

For maximum effect, open up a UNIX terminal and use ‘lynx’ to read http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/count_zero/ at no charge, the way many of us did back in the day.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

This site’s been up for eight days and I’m already recommending this for the second time. There’s a reason for that. For the better part of fifty years, Ellison’s sole genuine novel (there was a posthumous assemblage called Juneteeth) has been marginalized as a “book about the Black experience”. Well, it’s that — but it’s also a book about the male experience, the American experience, the human experience.

Here, too, the plot is beside the point and largely just a clunking mechanism to bring us a series of astounding vignettes, from a teenaged “battle royale” staged for the amusement of the white town fathers to a fantastical African-American vigilante group led by a glass-eyed Napoleon. Always you have Ellison’s razor-sharp and brutally earnest mind with you to dissect every scene to its last shred of meaning.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man was perhaps the first novel by a Black man to present his people as intellectually powerful, ambitious, and (most critically) subject to all the usual human failings. The shoeshine mysticism of Toni Morrison and her fellow-travelers was a step backwards from Ellison’s aggressive demand for an equal seat at the literary table. Even today, the majority of novels about “the Black experience” can’t help but dabble in voodoo and gumbo and wildly exaggerated accents; in that regard, we’ve come a long way in seventy years, all of it backwards.

Invisible Man can be read for free at https://modernforms.org/wp-content/uploads/Ralph-Ellison-Invisible-Man-Text.pdf

Airships, Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah always suffered from his reputation as “the writer’s writer”, concocting absurd assemblages of word and thought for an overindulgent Esquire. Much of his most outrageous material is republished in Airships.

…I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t.

You could not believe how handsome and delicate my wife is naked.

I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago.

That’s the setup for “Water Liars”, in which the narrator finds out that his wife had fibbed a bit to him about her early sexual exploits so he flees to a fishing trip for solace. There, away from his wife, he can stop thinking about what she’s done — but it turns out one of the old fishermen has a story of his own, tailor-made to make him remember. “We were both crucified by the truth,” he concedes.

There are also a few stories in which Vietnam and the Civil War are merged in a sort of nightmare confection designed to display man’s inhumanity to man. It has to be said that Hannah is not a great novelist, the same way that a quarter horse is not a great way to drag an Amish carriage. He hits you with a right-left-uppercut then finishes the story. You don’t need to read anything beyond Airships to see the man’s genius at work.

Honorable Mention: On My Way To Paradise, Dave Wolverton

Chances are that if you know Dave Wolverton at all you know him from his Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, most regrettably The Courtship of Princess Leia. He died a few months ago from “a bad fall” at the age of sixty-four, which is terrifying to me and most of you, I suspect.

Wolverton was a hack of the worst kind for most of his career, cranking out starship-shit for a steady paycheck. Who can blame him? Beats working a real job. The irony of this, however, is that he began his career with a genuinely brilliant book. On My Way To Paradise is just a few years younger than Neuromancer but it’s a complete rethinking of the cyberpunk archetype that along the way manages to cook up a very convincing and heartfelt romance between an old South American doctor and a genetically-engineered quasi-human with a thirst for a bit of ultra-violence.

There is so much original thinking in this book. It’s not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, and it doesn’t approach critical value the way that the best efforts of Gibson, Sterling, and a few others do — but if your primary exposure to sci-fi is the arrant trash expelled from the distended cloacae of John Scalzi and N.K. Jemisin, this will feel like washing your hands in cold, clear water.

Let’s open the thread, shall we?

Please put your own book recommendations below, along with whatever you’d like to share about the work in question.